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I think so. I lost count of the little things, it really was death by a thousand paper cuts.
I was a pretty rabid fan of Ubuntu, still have an x86 and ppc CD of 5.04 somewhere.
But by the time snaps started appearing, and then Ubuntu pro, Ubuntu decided to revert some of my customized configs in /etc after an upgrade, I had had enough. When snaps were reinstalled after an upgrade in 2021, I just flipped over to Debian, which has come a long way in being usable out of the box.
I have been using ffmpeg to convert audio files to MP3 format for my commercial web service and have found out that ffmpeg is no longer available in my version (12.
At the time, canonical was throwing its weight around and essentially bullying Debian upstream repos. Around this time, there was a mass exodus of the Debian leadership over this kind of thing.
The old guard of Debian wasn't as... enthusiastic about systemd either, but look what they use now.
I switched from Ubuntu to Debian, and it's basically the same thing, just faster since it uses native packages instead of Snaps. Ubuntu might as well run all it's apps in Docker containers.
You could rebrand Debian to Ubuntu and most users wouldn't even notice.
Arch requires reading the manual to install it, so installing it successfully is an accomplishment.
It's rolling release with a large repo which fits perfectly for regularly used systems which require up-to-date drivers. In that sense it's quite unique as e.g. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has less packages.
It has basically any desktop available without any preference or customisations by default.
They have a great short name and solid logo.
Arch is community-based and is quite pragmatic when it comes to packaging. E.g. they don't remove proprietary codecs like e.g. Fedora.
Ubuntu is made by a company and Canonical wants to shape their OS and user experience as they think is best. This makes them develop things like snap to work for them (as it's their project) instead of using e.g. flatpak (which is only an alternative for a subset of snaps features). This corporate mindset clashes with the terminally online Linux desktop community.
Also, they seem to focus more on their enterprise server experience, as that is where their income stream comes from.
But like always, people with strong opinions are those voicing them loudly. Most Linux users don't care and use what works best for them. For that crowd Ubuntu is a good default without any major downsides.
Edit: A major advantage of Ubuntu are their extended security updates not found on any other distro (others simply do not patch them). Those are locked behind a subscription for companies and a free account for a few devices for personal use.
Not really with archiinstall, but indeed as you say reading the manual is an expectation. Their philosophy is "creating an environment that is straightforward and relatively easy for the user to understand directly, rather than providing polished point-and-click style management tools", as well-summarized by Wikipedia.
wants to shape their OS and user experience as they think is best
tbh that goes for every distro. It's just that Canonical is more hands-on with its approach. The major complaint with Snap besides performance issues is Canonical making it so that only the Snap versions of popular apps (most famously, the bundled Firefox) are available by default.
I don't know about everyone else, but the last couple of years has had the most unstable Ubuntu releases, with the most unrecoverable releases when issues happen.
I've since moved to Fedora for desktop and straight Debian for server.
I used it a little way back in 2005-2006ish, and decided to give it a try again after a third reinstall of ubuntu within a year last year.
though, I'm about to get a "new" laptop and may toy around with Arch on the old one. I had previously tried setting up Arch in a VM but that's not supported and ended poorly.
I like arch because: - it is rolling release and I like having up to date software and not having to deal with distro upgrades breaking things - it is community run and not beholden to a company - packages are mostly unmodified from their upstream - the wiki and forums are the best of any distro
the wiki ~~and forums~~ are the best of any distro
If you don't participate in it that is. If you veer only a little off of their strict rules, then Arch forum will ban you and they won't allow you to even read the forum.
I don't really have a concise answer, but allow me to ramble from personal experience for a bit:
I'm a sysadmin that was VERY heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. It was all I worked with professionally and really all I had ever used personally as well. I grew up with Windows 3.1 and just kept on from there, although I did mess with Linux from time to time.
Microsoft continues to enshittify Windows in many well-documented ways. From small things like not letting you customize the Start menu and task bar, to things like microstuttering from all the data it's trying to load over the web, to the ads it keeps trying to shove into various corners. A million little splinters that add up over time. Still, I considered myself a power user, someone able to make registry tweaks and PowerShell scripts to suit my needs.
Arch isn't particularly difficult for anyone who is comfortable with OSes and has excellent documentation. After installation it is extremely minimal, coming with a relatively bare set of applications to keep it functioning. Using the documentation to make small decisions for yourself like which photo viewer or paint app to install feels empowering. Having all those splinters from Windows disappear at once and be replaced with a system that feels both personal and trustworthy does, in a weird way, kind of border on an almost religious experience. You can laugh, but these are the tools that a lot of us live our daily lives on, for both work and play. Removing a bloated corporation from that chain of trust does feel liberating.
As to why particularly Arch? I think it's just that level of control. I admit it's not for everyone, but again, if you're at least somewhat technically inclined, I absolutely believe it can be a great first distro, especially for learning. Ubuntu has made some bad decisions recently, but even before that, I always found myself tinkering with every install until it became some sort of Franken-Debian monster. And I like pacman way better than apt, fight me, nerds.
Arch has a very in-depth wiki that's the go-to resource for a lot of Linux users, and it offers a community-driven way to have access to literally anything that's ever landed on Linux ever through the AUR. It's also nice to have an OS that you never have to reinstall (assuming all things go well).
Why that turned into such a cult-meme is anyone's guess though.
About 10 years ago it was The Distro for first time linux users to prove they were a True Linux Enjoyer. Think a bunch of channers bragging about how they are the true linux master race because they edited a grub config.
Before Arch that role belonged to Gentoo. Since then that role has transitioned to NixOS who aren't nearly as toxic but still culty. "Way of the future" etc.
All three of have high bars of entry so everyone has to take pride in the effort they put in to learn how to install their distro. Like getting hazed into a frat except you actually learn something.
The Ubuntu hatred is completely unrelated. That has to do with them being a corporate distro that keep making bad design decisions. And their ubiquity means everyone has to deal with their bad decisions. (snap bad)
This is it mostly for sure. I used to be that True Linux Enjoyer. I still install arch sometimes but I only ever use an arch-derived distribution now that comes with an installer. I already feel like there’s not enough time in the day without having to manually copy files off a USB stick
I have a similar need for a "niche" install. I need Arch for it. I'm doing a laptop installation with LUKS2, TPM2, Secure Boot, systemd-boot with UKI, BTFRS, Apparmor and it has a Oculink eGPU dock station.
Last time I used EndeavourOS, I managed to get the graphical installer to install BTRFS on LUKS, it did require custom partitioning in the graphical installer, snapper just worked after that.
Zram (or was it Zswap?) was pretty easy to enable after installatiok
The bootloader might be beyond what the graphical installer can do though... I never really bothered switching...
To add, before the change the Gentoo wiki was a top resource when it came to Linux questions. Even if you didn't use Gentoo you could find detailed information on how various parts of Linux worked.
One day the Gentoo wiki died. It got temporary mirrors quickly, but it took a long time to get up and working again. This left a huge opening for another wiki, the Arch wiki, to become the new top resource.
I suspect, for a number of reasons, Arch was always going to replace Gentoo as the "True Linux Explorer", but the wiki outage accelerated it.
And here I am, just planning on going to Mint or something whenever win 10 support finally actually ends. I had Ubuntu like 15 years ago for a while, but I'm at a point where I want to do less learning about my operating system.
The way I see it, you can have an OS that breaks less often and is hard to fix, or an OS that breaks a little more often that is easy to fix. I choose the latter. 99/100 times, when something breaks with an update, it's on the front page of archlinux.org with a fix.
The problems I've faced with other distros or windows is the solution is often "reinstall, lol", which is like a 3 hour session of nails on a chalkboard for me.
How user friendly is the installation process? I've never tried, so I don't know. I'm curious now; just based on how people talk about it, I always perceived it as as distro that requires a lot of technical knowledge to use like Gentoo, which I unsuccessfully tried to install way back in 2010. I'm more knowledgeable and patient these days, so I may be able to work with arch.
You can use archinstall and it is dummy simple. Just have another computer or phone around to look things up and go down the menu like a checklist. My admittedly limited arch experience has so far been "run archinstall, use pacman to install tools as I run into things I'd like to have". I have a Framework 16 with the built in GPU, I imagine some hardware complicates this process but just look stuff up it's all out there unless you're on some really wild hardware. Even without archinstall you can follow the arch wiki and you're basically replicating what the tool does but using the wiki as your checklist and needing to type more
Well, Ubuntu uses Snap, which is a rather poor packaging solution that basically no other distro has adopted. By default it's a little bloated, it's made some controversial decisions (rust coreutils), and other distros just do what Ubuntu does better (like Mint)
People that got into Linux when most of the main distributions were easier to install than windows in most cases. Some people wanted to show off that they can install a Linux like it was when we did it back in the 90s for some reason I still don't understand till this day. I do like their wiki though. Works great for debian as well as arch.
I've been a slackware user since the late 90s. I take for granted how easy it is to install today. I've been tinkering with a socket 7 build, and nothing is easy. Installing slackware 8 is a pain in the ass. I can't even get half my hardware working on win95! It's not like riding a bicycle.
It's funny because I see the same cult behavior, but for Fedora. I've never understood the point of this distribution that has never worked well for me.
I'm on Manjaro by the way, because I love everything about Arch except the release style.
Funnily enough, I feel the opposite. Manjaro never worked reliably for me, but Fedora works great for my use case. Is it perfect? Fuck if I know. But it's a good, no-nonsense, extremely low maintenance, super reliable distro that I use daily with zero issues.
Also, they pioneered the atomic distro concept that has amazing use cases, and some fantastic projects are based on this technology. My gaming PC runs Bazzite for a zero-maintenance, immediate gaming experience. My dads laptop runs Bluefin and he hasn't broken it yet, and he's capable of breaking every single OS.
That said, never heard of fedora being a cult at all. Hell I feel it gets far less recognition than it should honestly for being cutting edge and stable.
But you're still getting updates every day, just two weeks later than Arch. The "testing" is just two other branches somewhat closer to the Arch package releases.
I'm using Fedora, but I'm not going to say it's my favorite. I liked MX and OpenSUSE a lot. Just had a hard time with running them on a computer. Fedora just worked out the box.
When I got fed up with windows 8.1 (and windows update bricked it), I first used ubuntu. How well or not it worked depended on the version. In version 19 it got some ugly white message boxes. I searched for how to change their color and found an angry dev saying no you cant change that. This was the final bullshit. Then I switched to arch, which lets me choose how my stuff looks and doesn't have the whole 3/4 versions are buggy thing. It works and ubuntu does not.
Arch is amazing for what it is, hence the love. It’s what you make of it; by default there’s nothing and you design your own system from scratch. This leads to a very passionate and enthusiastic community who do great work for one another, for everybody’s benefit. Anything under the sun can be found in the AUR, the distro repos are fresh and reliable, and every issue that arises has a hundred people documenting the fix before it’s patched.
Ubuntu has a bad reputation for inconsistency, privacy invasive choices, etc. I don’t think all the hate is deserved, as they corrected course after the Amazon search fiasco, but I still won’t use it because of Snaps. They have a proprietary backend, so even if I wanted to put up with their other strange design decisions I can’t unless I wanted closed source repos. That goes against my whole philosophy and reasoning for being on Linux to begin with, and many feel the same.
Normal people who use Arch don't bring it up much, because they're all sick of the memes and are really, REALLY tired of immediately being called rude elitist neckbeard cultists every time they mention it.
The Ubuntu hate is because Canonical has a long history of making weird, controversial decisions that split the Linux community for no good reason.
Unity would be the first example, and although Unity was actually a good DE, it was too bloated and almost non-modifiable.
People jumped ship to Linux Mint that had its priorities straight.
Mir and Snap were bigger issues though as Wayland and Flatpak were great replacements for X11 and AppImage and did not need another competitor.
But the privacy issues were the straw that broke the camel's back. People left windows for linux so they wouldn't have to deal with this kind of nonsense.
I actually jumped when Ubuntu jumped to Gnome 3. Gnome 3 was too bloated for me and it looked ugly.
I decided to see what Arch Linux was about and eventually settled for Manjaro Linux. Arch + Xfce for the win.
I left Ubuntu after Unity, it could have been the greatest thing ever, but Canonical deciding what was best for me felt too much like Microsoft just shoving whatever garbage they wanted to my system.
I'm quite experienced in Linux but I wouldn't use either. Arch is great if you like to tinker, Ubuntu sucks for the not so libre approach , corporate ties, telemetry etc. I distrohopped before but today I just install my debian based distro and shit works.. Ubuntu I've installed twice before when I was new to Linux, and have had a major issues every time due to official updates that broke internet drivers and other things, that's a fun one when you only have one PC . Not to mention its so bloated that shitty computers that I like to thinker with it have a hard time catching up. The arch thing is also mostly a kind of meme, targeting the more unbearable nerds. People I hated when I was a noob (they will let you know you are) But they are found everywhere and in general I don't think there's more of those people in arch community than anywhere else. It's more of a stab at elitism than arch specifically.
I feel like it isn't really specific to arch, every distro has a following, but some are more "passionate" about it than others. I think arch, NixOS, and gentoo are the most notable.
It has: - a great wiki - many packages, enough for anything you want to do - its the only distros that is beetween everything done for you and gentoo-like fuck you. - and the Memes.
While Ubuntu is a desktop distro that does server too and shove their snaps in your face, even though they're slow to use and bound to their (proprietary?) server.
pacman, seriously, I don't hear enough of how great pacman is. Being able to search easily for files within a package is a godsend when some app refuses to work giving you an error message "lib_obscure.so.1 cannot be found". I haven't had such issues in a long time, but when I do, I don't have to worry about doing a ten hour search, if I'm lucky, for where this obscure library file is supposed to be located and in what package it should be part of.
rolling release. Non-rolling Ubuntu half-year releases have broken my OS in the past around 33% of the time. And lots of apps in the past had essential updates I needed, but required me to wait 5 months for the OS to catch up.
Hmm, finding what package a file is in is absolutely possible on Ubuntu/Debian too. You can use the online Ubuntu/Debian packages search, or use apt-file.
The packages don't exist on Debian, they'd need to be built from source. Dependencies are a bitch on Debian (apt will remove things by itself). That's why I like the AUR.
"I run Arch btw" became a meme because until install scripts became commonplace you had to have a reasonable understanding of the terminal and ability to read and follow instructions to install Arch Linux to a usable state. "Look at my l33t skills."
Dislike of Ubuntu comes from Canonical...well...petting the cat backwards. They go against the grain a lot. They're increasingly corporate, they did a sketchy sponsorship thing with Amazon at one point, around ten years ago they were in the midst of this whole "Not Invented Here" thing; all tech had to be invented in-house, instead of systemd they made and abandoned Upstart, instead of working on Wayland they pissed away time on Mir, instead of Gnome or KDE they made Unity, and instead of APT they decided to build Snap. Which is the one they're still clinging to.
For desktop users there are a lot better distros than Ubuntu these days.
I left Ubuntu for Arch because I got sick of Arch having everything I wanted and Ubuntu taking ages to finally get it. I was tired of compiling shit all the time just to keep up to date.
Honestly glad I made the change, too. Arch has been so much better all around. Less bloat and far fewer problems.
I installed arch before there was the official install script. It's not that is was THAT difficult, but it does provide a great sense of accomplishment, you learn a lot, customize everything, and you literally only install things you know you want. (Fun story: I had to start over twice: the first time I forgot to install sudo, the second I forgot to install the package needed to have an internet connection)
All of this combined mean that the users have a sense of pride for being an arch user so they talk about it more that the rest. There is no pride in clicking your way though an installer that makes all the choices for you
IMO Despite some unjustified rumors Arch is a very stable distro. For me it feels the same as Debian stability wise while still being on the cutting edge side. The Arch wiki is the second most important reason.
The problem there is that stable vs unstable distro uses a slightly different meaning of the word stable than you would use to talk about a stable vs unstable system.
In distro speak, a stable distro is one that changes very little over time, and an unstable one is one that changes constantly. That's sort of tangentially related to reliability, in that if your system is reliable and doesn't change then it's likely to stay that way, but it's not the same thing as reliability.
I think Arch is so popular because its considered a middle of the road distro. Even if not exactly true, Ubuntu is seen as more of a pre-packaged distro. Arch would be more al a carte with what you are actually running. I started with Slackware back in the day when everything was a lot more complicated to get setup, and there was even then this notation that ease of access and customization were separate and you can't have both. Either the OS controls everything and its easy or you control everything and its hard. To some extent that's always going to be true, but there's no reason you can't or shouldn't try to strike a balance between the two. I think Arch fits nicely into that space.
I also wouldn't use the term "cultists" as much as "aholes". If you've ever been on the Arch forums you know what I'm talking about. There is a certain kind of dickish behavior that occurs there, but it somewhat is understandable. A lot of problems are vaguely posted (several times over) with no backing logs or info to determine anything. Just "Something just happened. Tell me how to fix it?". And on top of that, those asking for help refuse to read the wiki or participate in the problem solving. They just want an online PC repair shop basically.
I'm not sure either. I think arch used to be one of the less popular distros (because of the more involved install process, solved now by the arch-based distros with friendly installers), despite having some of the best features, so it required more "evangelism", that's unecessary now. Arch-based distros are now some of the most popular ones, so its not necessary.
Others have commented on why its so great, but the AUR + Rolling releases + stability means that arch is one of the "stable end states". You might hop around a lot, but its one of the ones you end up landing on, and have no reason to change from.
That is the main reason I use Arch. I am not a Linux expert but I am able to solve most of my problems reading the wiki. I used to use Ubuntu and Mint but those ended with me copy pasting stuff into the terminal and not really learning anything. When I switched back to Linux this time I went with Arch.
Because there are still people who have not yet seen the light. Once everyone has joined the fold they will not be able to remember why anyone resisted in the first place.
There are a lot of different reasons that people hate Ubuntu. Most of them Not great reasons.
Ubuntu became popular by making desktop Linux approachable to normal people. Some of the abnormal people already using Linux hated this.
In November 2010, Ubuntu switched from GNOME as their default desktop to Unity. This made many users furious.
Then in 2017, Ubuntu switched from Unity to Gnome. This made many users furious.
There's also a graveyard of products and services that infuriated users when canonical started them, then infuriated users when they discontinued them.
And the Amazon "scandal".
And then there's the telemetry stuff.
Meanwhile. Arch has always been the bad boy that dares you to love him... unapproachable and edgy.
Nix is great but not the saving grace I thought it would be. I daily it. Like it. Run cinnamon coming from Mint. But to be fair. It takes real effort and time to setup your config file, comment it thoroughly and then master the system. Once it's fully automated backups and all you can hop machine to machine and it's like you never left your OG machine. There's pros and cons for sure.
If there was a simple Debian based distro that I could declaratively manage via a single config file, I think I'd try it. I.e. not using Puppet or Chef that can only bootstrap a system state, but something to truly manage a system's entire life cycle, including removing packages and anything littering the system file tree. But since there isn't, I'm using NixOS instead.
Having a DSL to declare my entire system install, that I can revision control like any other software project, has been convenient for self documenting my setup and changes/fixes over time. Modularizing that config has been great for managing multiple host machines synchronously, so both my laptop and desktop feel the same without extra admin work.
Nixpkgs also bolsters a lot of bleeding edge releases for the majority of FOSS packages I use, which I'm still getting used to. And because of how the packaging works, it's also trivial to config the packages to build from customer sources or with custom features. E.g. enabling load monitoring for Nvidia GPUs from btop that many distros don't ship by default.
I've started with ubuntu/mint and it was always a matter of time before something broke then i tried everything from then all the major distros and found that I loved being on a rolling release with openSUSE Tubleweed (gaming and most new software works better) and BTRFS on Fedora (BTRFS let's you have boot time snapshots you can go back to if anything breaks).
After some research I found I can get both with arch so installed arch as a learning process via the outstanding wiki and have never looked back. Nowadays I just install endevourOS because it's just an arch distro with easy BTRFS setup and easy gui installer was almost exactly like my custom arch cofigs and it uses official arch repos so you update just like arch (unlike manjaro). It's been more stable than windows 10 for me.
Tldr: arch let's you pick exactly what you want in a distro and is updated with the latest software something important if you game with nvidia GPU for example.
I had moved from Slackware to Debian but by 2004 the long release cycles of Debian were making it very hard to use any Debian with current hardware or desktop environments. I was using Sid and dealing with the breakages. Ubuntu promised a reskinned Debian with 6 month release cycles synced to Gnome. Then they over delivered with a live cd and easy installation and it was a deserved phenomenon. I very enthusiastically installed Warty Warthog. Even bought some merch.
When Ubuntu launched it was promoted as a community distro, "humanity towards others" etc despite being privately funded. Naked people holding hands. Lots of very good community outreach etc.
The problem for Ubuntu was it wasn't really a community distro at all. It was Canonical building on the hard work of Debian volunteers. Unlike Redhat, Canonical had a bad case of not invented here projects that never got adopted elsewhere like upstart, unity, mir, snaps and leaving their users with half-arsed experiments that then got dropped. Also Mint exists so you can have the Ubuntu usability enhancements of Debian run by a community like Debian. I guess there is a perception now that Ubuntu is a mid corpo-linux stuck between two great community deb-based systems so from the perspective of others in the Linux community a lot of us don't get why people would use it.
Arch would be just another community distro but for a lot of people they got the formula right. Great documentation, reasonably painless rolling release, and very little deviation from upstream. Debian maintainers have a very nasty habit of adding lots of patches even to gold standard security projects from openbsd . They broke ssh key generation. Then they linked ssh with systemd libs making vulnerable to a state actor via the xz backdoor. Arch maintainers don't do this bullshit.
Everything else is stereotypes. Always feeling like you have to justify using arch, which is a very nice stable, pure linux experience, just because it doesn't have a super friendly installer. Or having to justify Ubuntu which just works for a lot of people despite it not really being all that popular with the rest of the linux community.
I don't really understand either. Where are the Gentoo and LFS elitists? It seams like there should be more of those than arch elitests. Maybe it's just because more people use arch.
Ok, I think I can provide some insight into this that I think it's missed on other replies.
I switched to Arch back when Arch had an installer, yup, that's right, Arch used to have an installer, then they removed it and you had to do most of the process manually (yes, I know pacstrap is technically an installer, but I'm talking about the original ncurses installer here).
After Arch removed its installer it began to attract more purists, and with that the meme was born, people online would be discussing stuff and someone would explain something simple and the other would reply with "I use arch BTW", which meant you didn't need to explain trivial stuff because the person had a good idea on how their system works.
Then Arch started to suffer from being too good of a distro, see those of us that were using it consistently saw posts with people complaining about issues on their distros that never affected us, so a sort of "it doesn't happen on my distro" effect started to grow, putting that together with the excellent wiki that people were linking left and right (even for non Arch users) and lots of people became interested.
This new wave of users was relatively new to Linux, they thought that by following a tutorial and running a couple of command lines when installing arch they had become complete experts in Linux, and they saw the "I use Arch btw" replies and thought they meant "I know more than you because I use Arch", so they started to repeat that. And it became common to see posts with people being L337 H4ck3r5 with no clue whatsoever using "I use Arch btw".
That's when the sort of cult mentality formed, you had experienced people who liked Arch because it was a good distro that didn't break on its own with good documentation to help when you screw up, these people suffered a bit from this and told newbies that they should use Arch. Together with that you had the other group who thought because they installed Arch they were hackers telling people Arch was waaaay too hard, and that only true Linux experts should use it. From the outside this must have felt that we were hiding something, you had several people telling you to come to our side or they couldn't help you, or pointing at documentation that looked specific for their distro, and others saying you weren't cool enough for it probably felt like a cult recruiting.
At the end of the day Arch is a very cool distro, I've tried lots of them but prefer Arch because it's a breeze to maintain in the long run. And the installation process is not something you want to throw at a person who just wants to install Linux to check it out, but it's also not complicated at all. There are experts using Ubuntu or other "noob" distros because at the end of the day it's all the same under the hood, using Arch will not make you better at Linux, it will just force you to learn basic concepts to finish the installation that if you had been using Linux for a while you probably already know them (e.g. fstab or locale).
As for Ubuntu, part of it stems from the same "I use Arch btw" guys dumping on Ubuntu for being "noob", other part is because Canonical has a history of not adoption community stuff and instead try to develop their own thing, also they sent your search queries to Amazon at some point which obviously went very badly for their image in the community.
I used Ubuntu as my first distro out of curiosity sometime around 2006. I've tried others (Mint, Pop OS, Debian, Fedora) but mostly settled with Ubuntu because it was just kind of ok for me and as another user said, there was a lot of articles that helped with getting things working because it became popular.
I had heard of Arch and to your point the it's complicated thing very much kept me away from it even though I have been using computers for around 30 years and was comfortable using a terminal.
The other thing is gaming, I consistently had problems with the nvidia cards that I've had over the years and never really cared to dig into trying to get things to work so Linux was kind of my testing ground for other things and just general learning about how things work.
Then I finally just had enough of Windows a couple of years ago, and with gaming support getting better I went back to Ubuntu and it just didn't feel good, I wanted something different that was setup how I wanted it so I looked into Arch.
I tried a couple of times to manually install it but my attention span (ADHD) kept me from focusing on the documentation enough to actually learn what I was doing. In comes the archinstall script, it was basic enough for me to follow and understand to get my system up and running.
I went through roughly 3-4 installs using it and testing stuff after I had it running and breaking stuff and just doing a fresh install since the script made it very easy. Since then I have learned a good bit more, and honestly don't think I will ever use another distro for my desktop. Just the ability to make it exactly what you want and things just work. Not to mention the documentation is massive and the AUR is awesome.
I do use Pop OS on my wife's laptop since it decided to automatically upgrade to W11 which crippled it and I just wanted something that I could just drop on there that would work with no real configuration since the only thing it needs is Citrix which works ootb and she can use all her office tools through that and has libre office if she wants to do something locally.
I do have a separate drive with W11 on my desktop, its used for one thing, SolidWorks. Which I use enough to merit having windows.
Arch was and still kind of is seen as the "I use Arch BTW" crowd, but it really shouldn't be that way. The install script isn't fancy, but it works. I think that would be one of the biggest barriers to break that mindset and open it to more people that are still fresh to Linux. I think that having even the most basic "GUI" for installing Arch would do wonders.
I don't use either now. I have tried both. When I started with Ubuntu i was great; fast, light, all the good stuff. Then it started to get bloated and wouldn't run on my old machine... So I moved to Arch and it saved me and I used it for years.
My way of thinking and working is incompatible with most premade automatism, it utterly confuses me when a system is doing something on its own without me configuring it that way.
That's why I have issues with many of the "easy" distributions like Ubuntu. Those want to be to helpful for my taste. Don't take me wrong, I am not against automatism or helper tools/functions, not at all. I just want to have full knowledge and full control of them.
I used Gentoo for years and it was heaven for me, the possibility to turn every knob exactly like I wanted them to be was so great, but in the end was the time spend compiling everything not worth it.
That's why I changed to Arch Linux. The bare bone nature of the base install and the high flexibility of pacman and the AUR are ideal for me. I love that Arch is not easy, that it doesn't try to anticipate what I want to do. If something happens automatically it is because I configured the system do behave that way.
Ubuntu? Its a can't make up its mind what it is trying to be while always becoming a crashy mess. When it first came out I remember trying it and immediately broke it.
The last time I installed it recently it had issues out of the box.
So I love Debian but it prides itself on stability so packages tend to be older. I think this is good for a server but probably not great for a desktop. Ubuntu came along and was like we'll be like Debian but newer packages. Everything was cool for a while but then they started doing shitty things. The first that I can think of was ads in the terminal. This was not great for an open source app. Then when you did apt install firefox it installed Firefox as a snap. WTF?!?!? (apt should install .deb files, not snaps). Because of this, lately I've decided to avoid Ubuntu.
I used Gentoo for a while and it was great but configuring and compiling everything took forever. I'm getting too old for that. Arch seems like a good alternative for people who want to mess with their system. So it's become a way for people to claim they know what they are doing without having to recompile everything. (Note: I haven't used Arch, this is just my perception)
Recently I got a new laptop and I had decided to put Linux on it and had to decide what distro. Arch was in consideration but I ended up going with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it's got the latest but I don't really have to configure anything. If I had more time, I might go with something like Arch but I don't really want to do that much fiddling right now.
I wonder if it's just me or if other people who were around before Ubuntu feel the same way but the reason I hate Ubuntu is that it seemed to take over the Linux world.
A lot of the information about how to do something in Linux was drowned out by how to do it in Ubuntu. When searching for information you have to scroll down in the search results for something that sounds unrelated to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu material was often titled "how to do it in Linux" and you thought you had a good long tutorial until you read a few paragraphs in and realized it was for Ubuntu and wouldn't work for you for whatever reason.
Even some software that says it's available on Windows and Linux just means they have a Ubuntu package and if you're really good there's a chance you might be able to figure out how to use it on a non Ubuntu system.
It's like when Ubuntu came out, people just assumed that Linux was Ubuntu. I've never used Ubuntu so a lot of the information I've came across regarding it has just been in the way of me finding useful information.
Arch has a cult like following because it emphasizes simplicity and customizability. If you have the time to fully administer your own system, there is no better choice.
Ubuntu is corporate, frequently out of date, and sometimes incompetent. They got big a long time ago when they were a significantly easier option than their competitors, but I really don't think there's compelling reason for a new user to install Ubuntu today.
To add to the arch management, after a while you learn the golden rule - set it and don't fiddle with it too much. Nowadays there is very little maintenance to it. I run an update followed by shutdown. Once every 2-3 months there is some issue, that takes a forum search to fix and once a year it breaks to the level where I need about half an hour to an hour to fix it.
Maybe it's masochism, but I like Arch because it forces me to make mistakes and learn. No default DE, several network management choices, lots of configuration for non-defaults. These are all decisions I have to make, and if I try to cut corners I usually get punished for it.
However, I think the real reason I stick with arch is because this paradigm means that I always feel capable of fixing issues. As people solve the issues they face, forum posts and wiki articles (and sometimes big fixes) get pushed out, and knowledge is shared. That sense of community and building on something I feel like Arch promotes.
For me, Ubuntu is ugly as all hell and comes with so much I dont need. It also ran slow on the first machine I ever installed it on. I like Arch because I got my feet wet there. It was my classroom.
The Arch users being so vocal is more of a trope to me. Never fails to make me smile.
Ubuntu started as a great endeavour. They made Linux much more approachable to the less tech inclined user.
It is an achievement to get a distro capable of basically work out of the box that hides the hard/technical stuff under the hood and delivers a working machine, and they did it and popularized Linux in the process.
Unfortunately, they abused the good faith they garnered. The Amazon partnership, their desktop that nobody really enjoyed, the Snap push. These are the ones I was made aware of but I risk there were more issues.
I was a user of Ubuntu for less than six months. Strange as it may sound, after trying SUSE and Debian, when I actively searched for a more friendly distro, I rolled back to Debian exactly because Ubuntu felt awkward.
Ubuntu is still a strong contributor but unless they grow a spine and actually create a product people will want to pay for, with no unpopular or weird options on the direction the OS "must" take, they won't get much support from the wide user community.
I don't know if that ever was true but I definitely disagree with that nowadays because Arch is in my opinion significantly more approachable and easier to daily-drive than Gentoo.
I have to use Zoom for a online class and I was wondering how I can make my Zoom experience more private? Is there a Zoom client that I can use like how there are privacy-focused Discord clients? What privacy tips would you recommend?
GrapheneOS is currently under a state sponsored attack attempting to misrepresent it as being for criminals, which we covered a bit at grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/…. These poorly researched, biased and inaccurate news stories have led to more harassment towards our community and team.
These attacks are taking a multi pronged approach including pushing existing fabricated stories and harassment towards our team. We'd appreciate if our community was more active than usual in debunking misinformation and attacks on our team. It's a very abnormal wave of attacks.
European authoritarians and their enablers in the media are misrepresenting GrapheneOS and even Pixel phones as if they're something for criminals. GrapheneOS is opposed to the mass surveillance police state these people want to impose on everyone.
Los Google Pixel son los máximos representantes de Android, con permiso de Samsung. Es por ello que convencen a los usuarios entusiastas del sistema...
GrapheneOS based on Android 16 has been through extensive public Alpha/Beta testing and should reach our Stable channel today. We'll continue fixing various upstream Android 16 regressions such as the back button issue impacting the stock Pixel OS we fixed in our latest release.
July Android Security Bulletin will likely be published today. We obtained early access to the signed partner preview and confirmed no additional patches were required, so we set the 2025-07-01 patch level last month after we backported Pixel 2025-06-05 driver/firmware patches.
Tomorrow will likely be the first monthly update of Android 16 with a new Android Open Source Project and Pixel stock OS release. We won't need to backport Pixel driver/firmware patches since we're on Android 16 and can simply incorporate and ship the monthly update within hours.
It can be extraordinarily difficult to backport driver/firmware patches due to dependencies on the new major release. We were only able to backport everything required for the 2025-06-05 security patch level because Android 15 QPR2 is much closer to Android 16 than Android 15.
After our Android 16 port was completed yesterday, we started fixing an Android tapjacking vulnerability disclosed last month:
We have a fix implemented and it will be included in our next release, likely with the monthly Android 16 update tomorrow.
This vulnerability was disclosed to Google in October 2024 and Android still hasn't fixed it. Security researchers should report vulnerabilities to GrapheneOS in addition to Google. This now joins our many other GrapheneOS exclusive fixes for serious Android vulnerabilities.
We've decided to make another release today with our fix for the Android tapjacking vulnerability because we need to fix a DisplayPort alternate mode regression specific to 8th generation Pixels which doesn't impact 9th generation Pixels.
I dug out my old Asus Zenbook (UX305CA) and refurbished it: gave it a good cleaning, replaced the thermal paste, installed a new battery, upgraded the SSD, and did a clean install of Ubuntu 24.04 (don't judge; everything else in my house is still Debian and/or OpenWRT).
The only thing I can't upgrade is the memory since it's soldered on. It's got 8 GB which hasn't really been a limit given my use cases, but since I'm in upgrade mode, I was thinking of running it with zram configured.
I just setup zram and gave it 50% of the physical memory as a starting point, set vm.swappiness to 140, and am using zstd as the compression algorithm.
Haven't noticed much difference, so there doesn't seem to be much CPU performance penalty even on this low-spec CPU (base clock 900 MHz lol). zramctl shows it's got 726 MB swapped to it currently which is compressed to 126 MB. Not bad! The only thing I haven't done yet is set the power profile to "Power Saver" - if there are going to be noticeable performance penalties, that's probably when it will show up.
I've only ever used zram on Raspberry Pis and on an old netbook, so I'm not sure if using it on a machine with an otherwise usable amount of RAM is even worth it.
I'm using zram on all my systems, be it 4GB or 16GB. Usually swap is empty, so there's no compressing for the CPU to do anyway. If a RPI is capable of ZRAM, your PC won't break a sweat.
ZSTD is really fast. I'm using btrfs compression too, and don't notice any performance impact either.
Zram is good, i would use lz4 as a compression method, it uses a lot less CPU than zstd and compression makes it around 50% bigger than compressed using zstd (50% compression vs 33% compression on zstd). So on CPU bound scenarios, it holds better than on zstd in my opinion. Same on btrfs, it feels a lot faster on lzo than on zstd.
I suspect zram's swap device only consumes RAM when it actually contains swapped pages, but I don't know for sure. Can anyone link an authoritative statement on this?
I use it on a 32 GiB workstation, also with PERCENT=50 and ALGO=zstd in Debian's /etc/default/zramswap, and vm.swappiness=60. This is its only swap device. I like that it avoids needless SSD wear and painfully slow interactivity during large compile and compression jobs.
Is it worth it on your system, which has only 2 CPU cores? If your memory-intensive workloads compress well, then I would think yes, for the same reasons that I like it. If you find your CPU struggling with it, you could always change to a lighter compression algorithm.
On the other hand, if your memory-intensive tasks don't compress well, then no, I would not expect it to be a good use of your CPU.
You'll never know until you try it. I suggest checking the output of zramctl when running tasks that create memory pressure.
I suspect zram's swap device only consumes RAM when it actually contains swapped pages, but I don't know for sure. Can anyone link an authoritative statement on this?
I'm wondering the same. I haven't read anything authoritative, but it definitely seems like it only consumes the RAM it's using. Otherwise, it wouldn't be able to create block devices that exceed the physical memory. I started to wonder when I had it set to 50% (4 GB) and gave it a stress test. The 4 GB it allocated filled up but was compressed to just about 1 GB, so I thought "surely this isn't wasting 3 GB of RAM to hold 1 GB of pages."
The guidelines I've read seem like there's some guesswork involved in the planning. Basically you can make the zram device as large as you want so long as the compressed data is less than the physical RAM (not all pages compress equally as you mentioned).
I've since bumped it to 200% of system ram (16 GB), and I think that's probably good enough for my use cases. I'm seeing about a 4:1 compress ratio, so I could go higher, but 8 GB has been plenty usable up until now. 🤷 I also left the original swap file in place with a lower priority as a spillover (I'm not really missing the 4 GB of disk space that uses, so might as well keep it).
If you can have a swapfile or swap partition, zswap will have much better experience than zram. And since Linux 6.8, zswap can disable writeback entirely so there will be nothing written to disk, just need a swapfile/swap partition to make kernel happy. aur.archlinux.org/packages/zsw…
partially revert upstream changes in Android 16 breaking parts of the lockscreen layout including the date and media info
Pixel 8 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL: add back feature declaration for Pixel Thermometer support lost in our Android 16 device port migration which prevented fresh installs of the app
Terminal (virtual machine management app): disable VM console feature since it isn't supported by the stable release of Android 16 outside of debug builds and trying to use it breaks installing the new images (the feature can be enabled once the core OS supports it in production builds)
update Pixel HAL compatibility matrix version numbers for Android 16
add lockscreen synchronization failsafe to protect against unknown vulnerabilities
improve code quality and add unit tests for our strict CVE-2024-50089 protection
kernel (6.6): update to latest GKI LTS branch revision including update to 6.6.94
fix port of our 2-factor fingerprint authentication tests to Android 16
GrapheneOS based on Android 16 is now available in our Beta channel. There are 2 main known issues which will be fixed in the next release: lockscreen date and media info are not properly displayed due to an upstream AOSP bug and Pixel Thermometer doesn't appear in our App Store.
Last month, we provided the 2025-06-01 Android/Pixel security patch level early in the month before the stock OS release as preparation and then backported Android 16 firmware and kernel/userspace driver patches to provide the 2025-06-05 Android and then Pixel patch levels.
Our 2025062700 release raised the overall patch level to 2025-07-01 since we got early access to it with a verifiable signature and know we already provide the patches. We usually do an early Android Security Bulletin release before the stock OS but it was done for July in June.
Android Security Bulletins are backports of High/Critical severity patches to older Android. Starting this month, the initial release of Android 16 is one of those older releases. It's split into AOSP userspace patches (YYYY-MM-01) and driver/firmware/Linux patches (YYYY-MM-05)
YYYY-MM-05 patch level has a device-specific portion with more driver/firmware patches. For Pixels, it's the Pixel Update Bulletin. Most Pixel Update Bulletin patches aren't specific to Pixels but the Android Security Bulletin doesn't cover Samsung cellular, Broadcom Wi-Fi, etc.
Pixel Update Bulletin patches are what we had to backport to Android 15 QPR2:
These were for firmware/drivers/services for Samsung cellular (including the Radio Interface Layer), Broadcom/Qualcomm Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, NVT touchscreen, fingerprint and TPU.
The only part truly specific to Pixels was the TPU patch. Bear that in mind when you look at those Pixel Update Bulletins. Other devices are meant to have their own bulletins covering the same things if they use those components and also further patches. It's fully up to OEMs.
Android Security Bulletin (ASB) is published on the first Monday of the month unless it's a US/Google holiday in which case it gets pushed ahead a day or two. The Android release for the month is a separate thing from the ASB backports, usually published the day after the ASB.
ASB is likely July 7 and the Android OS release is likely July 8. Our aim is to have Android 16 in our Stable channel prior to July 8 so we can ship the initial monthly update to Android 16 instead of needing to backport Pixel Update Bulletin patches which could be infeasible.
Each month, Android has a new stable OS release. It's a monthly, quarterly or yearly release. Quarterly and yearly releases move along the development branch about the same amount and have a similar amount of changes. Those have months of public Developer Previews / Betas first.
Pixels ship the latest monthly, quarterly and yearly release each month. Non-Pixels ship an initial yearly Android release and then only Android Security Bulletin backports until they ship the next yearly release. ASB backports are a subset of the AOSP patches, not all of them.
GrapheneOS needs to follow the stable releases in order to provide the full AOSP privacy/security patches. It also needs to keep up with them in order to ship Pixel driver/firmware patches which are made for the latest stable release, but we'd still need to do this on non-Pixels.
fix upstream Android 16 issue causing very large Binder transactions due to the size scaling based on the number of apps installed across all users including base OS apps
reduce virtual memory reserved for Binder buffers back to 1MiB now that we have a direct fix for the upstream issue causing more to be required and using a larger virtual memory reservation size appears to have a small chance of failing
revert our fix for a screenshot process crash that's now fixed upstream in Android 16
Android regularly adds and splits permissions for new API levels. Legacy apps are handled by treating them as requesting the permission to provide a toggle for it. For example, Android 13 converted the existing toggle for disabling notifications for an app into a new POST_NOTIFICATIONS permission.
The Android Open Source Project has infrastructure for this since it's a regular part of the app sandbox and permission model improving. We add Network and Sensors permission toggles in GrapheneOS where Network is based on the existing low-level INTERNET permission and Sensors is entirely new.
Nearly all apps are unaware of these non-standard permissions just as they're unaware of new permissions added by Android before they get upgraded. Therefore, we enable them by default for compatibility but provide the ability for users to disable them at install time like the standard permissions.
For Network, apps request INTERNET, so we provide a toggle for rejecting that request in the initial app install dialog. If it's added in an upgrade, it's disabled by default. For Sensors, apps don't request it so we handle it similarly to how Android handled POST_NOTIFICATIONS for existing apps.
When Network is disabled, we act as if the network is down for compatibility. We won't run network-dependent jobs, various APIs will report it as down and we give errors matching it being down. When Sensors is disabled, sensors not covered by standard permissions give zeroed data and no events.
For usability, apps trying to use those sensors when Sensors is disabled will trigger a notification from the OS which can be disabled on a per-app basis. This informs users about what's going on so they'll know the app is either doing something sketchy or that it may actually require it.
F-Droid has an incorrect approach to installing apps which wrongly warns users about the standard Android POST_NOTIFICATIONS permission, our OTHER_SENSORS permission and previous Android permission additions/splits. They wrongly blamed GrapheneOS and didn't fix it:
They're now realizing that it happens with standard Android permissions added / split in new releases. Their approach to installing apps has been incorrect in multiple ways for many years and this is one of them. Their approach to listing which permissions are used by apps is also very incorrect.
F-Droid has a long history of denying issues including covering up serious security flaws. In some cases they eventually ship a fix but still deny it. It's a major factor in why F-Droid is not a safe or trustworthy source of apps due to major security issues not being acknowledged or addressed.
Multiple of the F-Droid developers wrongly blaming their app bug on GrapheneOS in that issue are Calyx contractors. They prioritize attacking GrapheneOS with inaccurate claims and fabricated stories about our team over fixing a bug in their app impacting both GrapheneOS and non-GrapheneOS users.
We've repeatedly brought up F-Droid not properly listing permissions or checking for them. Their understanding of Android's permission model is wrong. The way they list permissions misleads and misinforms users. It's one of many major F-Droid flaws they consistently don't acknowledge or fix.
Due to F-Droid deliberately causing friction and annoyances for GrapheneOS users, we'll be implementing a feature similar to our sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer for it. We'll can resolve deliberate issues created for GrapheneOS users ourselves as we did with Revolut.
Search efforts continue for a fourth day as a girls' summer camp confirms 27 children and staff are dead, with 10 campers and one counsellor unaccounted for.
A climate change activist spray-painted Apple’s 5th Avenue storefront in New York City as part of an Extinction Rebellion protest against Big Tech’s “hypocrisy” about environmental commitments.
During an investors meeting, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa explained how the company is dealing with rising development costs in the Switch 2 era.
The vulnerability in question would've still happened if written in rust, it was not a memory leak. More an instance of feature creep, as the solution was to remove the functionality.
TikTok is ending its sponsorship of several major Canadian arts organizations, including the Juno Awards and the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), as it prepares to shut down its Canadian operations under a federal directive.
I had no idea this was about to happen. Why the heck did the government attack the office, which supports Canadian citizens? They should be focusing on consequences for the the way the app influences people in an unhealthy way, and is a force of foreign political coercion.
TikTok is ending its sponsorship of several major Canadian arts organizations, including the Juno Awards and the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), as it prepares to shut down its Canadian operations under a federal directive.
The company said it is complying with an order issued by Ottawa last November, which requires TikTok to wind down operations in Canada due to national security concerns. As a result, the company says it will suspend all partnerships and funding initiatives in the country. So, in other words, its offices will close, but the actual TikTok app will remain in Canada. Go figure.
Our (Lib under Trudeau) government banned TikTok to appease the US after they did the same under Biden. But Trump has since nullified the TikTok ban in the US. Why are we still going through with this? As a nice gift to the US tech oligarch (after we backtracked the Digital Services Tax on them)? Is the platform too leftwing for the government's liking?
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Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, is at a turning point in his leadership, highlighted by a recent humorous pancake flipping incident at the Calgary Stampede.
Despite a relatively positive polling period, Carney has yet to deliver substantial results, with only minor initiatives like an income tax cut and Bill C5 on the table.
Major issues, such as housing, remain largely unaddressed, raising concerns about the government's effectiveness.
Carney's handling of international relations, particularly with the U.S. and NATO, is scrutinized, as public patience may wane if concessions lead to unfavorable outcomes.
The upcoming trade deal deadline of July 21st poses challenges; public expectations may clash with the reality of necessary compromises.
There is growing concern regarding the government's increasing spending and the potential for significant national deficits, projected to reach around $310 billion over the next four years.
The delay in releasing a budget suggests a reluctance to disclose spending plans, which could lead to public discontent once revealed.
While government debt can be manageable if it fuels economic growth, long-term structural deficits without clear repayment strategies could pose risks.
The public's patience with Carney is expected to diminish as pressing questions about spending priorities and benefits to ordinary Canadians remain unanswered.
The government must shift its focus from large resource projects to addressing immediate economic needs, such as housing and affordability, to maintain public support.
-Kagi Universal Summarizer
Time saved reading: 8min
Original Document • Tokens: 3970 Length: 0:08:42 (time elapsed 12.8s)
I'm really torn about this comment - on one hand it's environment-destroying AI, but it also saves the need to watch a pointlessly long video that should have been an article and probably consumes as much compute as the AI summary.
True, at least when you share the results with others, the energy used is shared between everyone.
Sometimes I see these videos and want to know what they talk about but don't want to throw away hours of my life listening to them. And this is the only way I get both.
I'd really like to self host something like this so I can see how much power it's using.
If you want to go down that path - all of our actions online are environment destroying. This useless comment that I'm making needs to live in a datacenter somewhere, multiply that enough times and the energy needed just to have dumb conversations online is killing the planet on its own.
Do you mean specifically Carney flipping pancakes or politicians flipping pancakes in general? I can't speak about elsewhere but in Alberta organizations frequently put on pancake breakfasts often accompanying some other larger event. Politicians local to federal (depending on the size of the event) take it as an opportunity to do some glad-handing. In this particular case I guess Carney isn't a proficient pancake flipper.
B.C. Conservative Party members are reviewing John Rustad's leadership in accordance with the party's constitution, as he faces criticism from several sides.
Hot take from an American. Just send all your conservatives here for a few years. If they want to emulate us so bad they can see the horrors from up close.
Donald Trump will send foreign leaders more letters notifying them of new tariffs in the days to come, said Karoline Leavitt.
“There will be additional letters in the coming days,” the White House press secretary said, in addition to the 12 he plans to send today and the two already made public, which were to South Korea and Japan’s leaders,
As for why Trump decided to start with the two Asian allies, Leavitt said:
It’s the president’s prerogative and those are the countries he chose.
July 7 (Reuters) - A proposal seen by Reuters and bearing the name of a controversial U.S.-backed aid group described a plan to build large-scale camps called “Humanitarian Transit Areas” inside - and possibly outside - Gaza to house the Palestinian population, outlining a vision of "replacing Hamas' control over the population in Gaza."
The $2 billion plan, created sometime after February 11 and carrying the name of the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, was submitted to the Trump administration, according to two sources, one of whom said it was recently discussed in the White House.
Federal cabinet ministers are being asked to find ... ways to reduce program spending by 7.5 per cent in the fiscal year that begins April 1, 2026, followed by 10 per cent in savings the next year and 15 per cent in the 2028-29 fiscal year.
I'm getting 90s vibes. Government cutbacks, threats of separation, climate change. It's all here.
But there's a modern twist: we're talking about 3C change in 2100, there's a housing crisis, our media landscape is dominated by tech bros, and the US is lost in the culture wars.
“You will be expected to bring forward ambitious savings proposals to spend less on the day-to-day running of government, and invest more in building a strong, united Canadian economy,” Mr. Champagne wrote in one of the letters.
So cuts to the public service and services to fund loans/giveaways to the private sector.
“Through this ambitious review each minister should examine the programs and activities in their portfolio to determine which are: meeting their objectives, are core to the federal mandate, and complement versus duplicate what is offered elsewhere by the federal government or by other levels of government,” it states.
Anyone who has been through a round of layoffs recognizes this language. All it's missing is a need to find "efficiencies". Carney is looking less and less like the genius economy understander I was told he was and more and more like a bog standard orthodox Friedmanite.
That's what many of his left-leaning detractors have said. Unsurprisingly, the central banker is a dyed in the wool neoliberal who wants to trim government spending while shoveling money towards the private sector to grow the economy. Maybe wealth will finally trickle down this time. 😅
The annoying thing is that for a lot of his voters it seems like his decisions have been surprising. I'm seeing a lot of, "trust the plan," sort of comments elsewhere like this is all leading to some bait-and-switch social democratic turn. I think the Liberal campaign didn't focus on his fiscal orthodoxy and a lot of people just projected whatever they wanted him to be onto him.
I liked Jagmeet, and the NDP platform (well what i understood of it), if i wasn't worried that PP would get in they would have gotten my vote. I did feel that he didn't stand a chance of getting in.
I did read Carney's book (values), i found it extremely difficult to read, and said a lot without saying anything. I don't think he would get my vote if not for PP.
I'd like to see a rule that any politician voted in must work in an aid camp in a warzone to be elegable for office. Or maybe spend a year as an average citizen in their country.
Jagmeet was a nice enough person, but his communication never seemed to be about making changes, only criticising the other parties. It's possible I missed the more constructive messages, but the constant tearing down in political messaging is why I don't ingest much of it. NDP would also be my choice (outside of a spoiler situation), but the default answer isn't very inspiring.
FPTP isn't the only fucked up voting issue we have though, as the vote for leader also affected so many local representatives, and I thing that's where the NDP is currently strongest. Losing local reps is a sad price for opposing a national lunatic.
I've thoughs about similar restrictions to bring high-level politicians down to Earth. Hard limits to effective income from all sources of perhaps 2.5x minimum wage. Six months of consecutive retail or food service work.
I suspect if you polled the Carney voters from the last election, all but the NDP/Green ABC-crowd would be fine with these policies.
Ironically, many of the voters worried about the collapsing middle class (in the form of stagnating wages and the housing crisis) probably went with the CPC.
Carney is looking less and less like the genius economy understander I was told he was and more and more like ~~a bog standard orthodox Friedmanite.~~ politician
I think that's excessively cynical. If the politicians we put in power tend to look the same, that's a little bit on us for only picking from two different parties for the entire history of the country. There are certainly alternative ideas about economics.
The government in the 90s wasn't saying housing prices couldnt fall, which is the big difference I see. Now we have embraced the house of cards ponzi scheme built on cheap debt, we may as well start a Bitcoin reserve next.
I mean...I guess thanks for the stepping off point? Android has the Briar Project, which couldn't be distributed for iOS due to Apple's license fuckery. I'm at least curious enough to look through this and see what they've done different.
I think the most useless part of this is using BT only which has a range of what...40ft?
We’re turning every word of James Joyce’s Ulysses into a clickable link. Some links reflect the current state of the world, some capture modern culture, others are just playfully weird or totally random. Together, they create a living portrait of the Web, word by word. See them here. What topics do you think we should cover as we pick new links for this project?
Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake’s wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass…
Am I missing something here? The links seem to have no relevance to the word they're linked from; if that's the intent, what's even the point of making them linked from words in Ulysses? Further, out of the ~20 links you have here, there's already a duplicate link.
You're absolutely right: the links are not related to the words, that's the point: a total surprise. 20 links, we've just started this chapter (Chapter I (2)), therefore we're asking for your advice 😀
We've started another chapter earlier (Chapter I (1)), where everyone can add links, to any word. Feel free to add yours (or someone else's). Ulysses has 265,222 words. When we fill them all, it will become the world's largest portrait of the Web.
"Duplicate link" - we've doublechecked, haven't found any. Can you pinpoint it for us? I would be thankful 😀
Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake’s wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass…
The House of Commons transport committee will study BC Ferries’ decision to buy four electric-diesel vessels from a Chinese-owned firm — a purchase financed in part with $1 billion from a federal Crown corporation.
That's a ton of public money going to China, one billion of our tax paying money. I would love to see a Canadian bid, or pay more for an ally nation to build it, this deal needs to be scrapped and investigate the corruption and bribes that allowed it to get this far.
i disabled auto correct and predictive text. do i make more typos, yes, but it is better than having my sentences change as i type. i got so frustrated with words changing as i typed
it would help if you could clarify what you mean by wobbly or buzzy ... maybe some examples of songs or segments that have the sound you're describing?
The GNOME 49 Alpha '49.alpha' release was just announced as the first formal test release in the road to the GNOME 49 desktop release due out in September.
The GNOME 49 Alpha '49.alpha' release was just announced as the first formal test release in the road to the GNOME 49 desktop release due out in September.
I have RSI, and I use talon voice to control my computer.
Because Wayland doesn't, and probably won't support accessibility software like talon voice, in time, as x11 is shut down, I'll have to move to Mac or Windows. I'm devastated.
Talon voice is what allows me to continue working.
I'm literally going to have to move back to the dark side in time, due to the end of X11, and Wayland's lack of support for accessibility.
This is the one gigantic, glaring problem with Wayland. “The most secure software is the software you can’t use” is not a philosophy I support. Accessibility should always be a first class citizen for mission critical components like window managers.
I'll do what I can. However, x11 will definitely die in the upcoming years. Development is apparently only maintenance now and basic improvements. The writing is on the wall, as Wayland just doesn't support what the accessibility tools require.
I still use X because at least last time I tried (admittedly over a year ago) some of my apps didn't work right on Wayland (KLayout, if I remember correctly).
Keep coming back to Wayland. I've been using Linux as my main desktop OS since 2022, and at first, I encountered many issues with Wayland (KDE). However, I kept coming back and testing Wayland as the bugs were fixed. Now, Wayland is great! It feels like a true modern operating system — much better than Windows.
One of the ironies with System76 is that they are taking so long to release their Wayland-only desktop that they are becoming one of the last bastions of Xorg.
KDE user here, I still use X11 to play old Minecraft versions. LWJGL2 uses xrandr to read (and sometimes modify? wtf) display configurations on Linux, and the last few times I've tried it on Wayland it kept screwing the whole desktop up.
Slightly concerned about remote desktopping though. What do I replace xrdp with?
Xrdp works on Wayland, you can keep using it if you like. There's also Gnome's built-in Gnome Remote Desktop as well as KDE's Krdp, both are also Wayland compatible (though I get the feeling Krdp is still in its early stages).
I used Ubuntu 24.10. on new Ubuntu certified Intel Thinkpad and exeperienced system hangs every few weeks. The only solution was to reboot. Frustrating to say the least. On that system also webcam didn't work so maybe it was kernel fault somehow but still very disappointing given the "certified" status.
1: Open files. You can now use ctrl shift n to make a new folder.
2: Open an application. Click save as.. "files" opens. Now you can not use ctrl shift n. I just tested it again. I am also on gnome 48. This is an old an known limitation.
I'm in the process of getting a new printer and since I recently (December 2024) switched to Linux it would be nice if it would be Linux compatible. So far I've decided on the Canon PIXMA G550 printer but I can't find anything about it's compatibility so I figured I would just ask here in the hopes someone might have the same printer or knows someone who has the same printer and can tell me if this printer works with Linux. If all else fails I could still use the printer with my tablet or phone using Canons app but using it with my desktop would be much more comfortable.
I think network printer made by big manufacturer recent years should be fine with IPP driverless. They found Printer Working Group of IEEE, this organization maintains IPP standard and IPP Everywhere™ Certification. AirPrint can be treated as Apple version of IPP Everywhere, the difference between them is AirPrint requires Apple Raster but IPP Everywhere requires PWG Raster (and JPEG JFIF file format if color printer).
Ah, so they are actually differences between IPP Everywhere and AirPrint (apart from AirPrint including the whole autodiscovery stuff)? Good to know. The latter is usually more prominently advertised though which is why that’s the one I mentioned.
But yeah, it should be very common for these to be supported with anything remotely recent.
IPP Everywhere also include full autodiscovery stuff (mDNS and DNS-SD, of course, Apple call this combination as Bonjour). So I said raster is the only difference.
Raster is unimportant in Linux situation because CUPS support both PWG Raster (It's actually a subset of original CUPS Raster) and Apple Raster. Whichever one your device supports, CUPS will work fine.
When you say proprietary drivers, I assume that means they are only available for x86_64 platform... leaving ARM64/aarch64 devices, like Pi's and such, out of luck?
Something I've experienced with similar printer drivers. Hence the ask.
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#Wayland 1.24 Is Now Available for Download with New Features and Improvements https://9to5linux.com/wayland-1-24-is-now-available-for-download-with-new-features-and-improvements
#Linux #OpenSource
Just wanted to share some frustrations and open this up for discussion.
Unlike in Europe or parts of Asia, Canada has virtually no true pay-as-you-go (PAYG) mobile plans. Most so-called “prepaid” or “PAYG” options here are just monthly bundles with expiry dates — not actual usage-based billing. You’re often paying $15–30/month whether you use 100 MB or not at all.
To make things worse:
The minimum postpaid plan is now often 60 GB or more — which is total overkill for average users who don’t stream or game constantly.
Vacation suspensions are restricted or unavailable unless you upgrade to expensive plans and limited to a minimum of 30 days.
Text-to-911 is still not available to the general public, only for those registered as Deaf or hard of hearing — despite many emergency scenarios (hostage, abuse, low signal) where calling isn't possible.
CRTC and CCTS don’t help. The CRTC says they can’t intervene in pricing or service terms, and the CCTS (per Section 4.3) won’t challenge carrier policies themselves.
Please note that I’m not asking for charity or free service — just fairer options that reflect actual usage, more flexible policies, and access to emergency support.
Has anyone here had better experiences with MVNOs or alternatives? And why do we seem so far behind compared to other countries?
Its the good ol' telco monopoly. Doesn't help that our population density is basically nothing. We're the second biggest country by land mass, but have about the same population as California.
I'm not sure who we need to pressure to get better service for the money...
Yeah, population density gets blamed a lot — and while it explains some issues, it doesn't justify:
No true pay-as-you-go (even in cities and urban areas)
60+ GB minimum plans for light users
No public access to Text-to-911 (even when dangerous moments happen)
Inflexible vacation suspensions (with mandatory 30 days minimum)
Daily roaming access fees (yes, even with no usage, as long as a foreign tower is connected) from so called marketing such as Roger's Roam Like Home™, Telus Easy Roam®, and Bell Roam Better
The Big 3 hide behind geography while keeping margins high and MVNOs out.
Who to pressure? Well...... it's basically no one at the moment. * CRTC says it can’t touch pricing or service terms * CCTS won’t challenge policies (see Section 4.3) * I even contacted OpenMedia, CBC, CHEK, and CTV, but it feels like shouting into a void. The mainstream Canadian media ignore such issues especially for temporary residents like me.
Not asking for freebies — just flexible, fair options that reflect how people actually use mobile services.
Population density isn't a rural issue, it's a fixed costs issue.
The companies are required to maintain a larger total network of towers and everyone has to pay for that, which means city users are subsidizing rural networks quite significantly.
I'm not saying the Big 3 aren't taking advantage of the situation, but they do have a legitimate issue.
Totally fair — fixed infrastructure costs are real, and urban users likely do subsidize the broader network. But even within cities, the lack of options (like true PAYG or small data tiers) feels unnecessarily rigid.
The issue isn’t solely about cost — it’s how little flexibility or fairness is built into the plans, even for light users.
Allowing light or limited plans means that they don't have the revenue to cover the costs.
The actual usage on the network is functionally irrelevant at this point, providers don't save any money if people don't use their phones as much these days. It's almost all fixed costs which means that plans are essentially just fixed at this point too. Price points still exist only for advertising and marketing purposes, the companies are totally satisfied just getting everyone to a minimum value. The whole industry has just become a commodity but with 100% fixed costs.
It's not like they're raking in stupid profits either, TELUS only had a net income of around 5% of their revenue last year.
The options suck because there is no real competition, simple as that.
What the carriers actually care about is average revenue per customer (ARPU), so you will find that no matter the "deal" you get, you will be paying about the same minimum cost regardless of carrier at the same level. This is about $70/mo for Telus/Rogers/Bell, and $35/mo for their discount brands Koodo/Fido/Virgin. All that really changes is the amount of data you get, which they can easily give more of since the data itself is practically free. The only reason that these companies would ever do anything to deviate from the status quo is if a new company came in and challenged them, or they were legislated to change their policies, otherwise all they care about is maximizing revenues for shareholders.
Yep, even trying to “vote with your wallet” doesn’t help. Fizz couldn’t even port my number due to technical issues — no working eSIM, no service, and refund still pending. They do allow limited refunds within a trial period (15 days, once per year), but that didn’t stop the headache. Public Mobile worked but wasn’t great either. The issue runs deeper than just price.
True, in Canada most plan suck if you are not a heavy user. I use maybe 20 minutes of call per month, some SMS for 2FA, and quite often less than 250MB of data per month...
I agree that most Canadian plans aren’t great unless you’re a heavy user. I actually use very little talk and SMS — mostly just for 2FA and phone verification for apps.
That said, Fizz didn’t work for me at all. They failed to initiate the porting process due to technical issues on their end. I never received a working eSIM, and even though I requested a refund (they allow it with limited cases, such as within the 15-day trial window and only once per year), it’s still pending ticket resolution. No service was ever usable.
I also tried Public Mobile, and while it technically worked, the overall experience and value still didn’t meet my needs.
Just putting this out there in case anyone else is considering these providers — your mileage may vary.
I agree totally with what you said! . If you don't search for deals or negotiate, you will get a basic plan, which worth nothing. How about new providers coming in Canada, and a year later or so is leaving or bought by Rogers or Bell. They killed competition and now they control everything! Who is going to control them? This monopoly kills everything.
I also want to add phones, we stuck buying Samsung, Apple, Motorola and One plus, any other phones like the nothing phone, most likely won't work, because of bands. I want to be able to buy a mid tier phone, and not a crappy Motorola or an expensive Samsung.
edit: And now they going to shut down 3G, because as far I know it costs for them!
Yeah Canadian prepaid plans all seem to have the scammy expiring bullshit built in.
I use my phone basically just for maps and being reachable in an emergency. Best one in Canada I've found that actually works is $99 a year or $119 if I want data (which I do need). A couple of the "budget" options have the exact same plan, but I went with Freedom to not have to deal with Rogers bs. These have unlimited calls and texts, data is limited to 15GB / year, but it's just goes to slow speed after 15GB at no extra costs. Very pricey for what I need it for still.
I used to have shitty prepaid plan sold by petrocan where the cheapest option was $25 for 3 months, but with very limited amount of data and the whole thing just didn't work half the time (no calls, texts or data).
Comparing these to Nordics is pretty rough. We go to Finland every couple years and we get a package with SIM card and enough data and calls for the 2 to 3 weeks we stay there with 15 euros. You just go to convenience store to pick it up, no signing anything needed. Just need to bring a phone that's not SIM locked.
The CRTC is mostly run by former telco people and it shows.
Its the same reason we "couldn't" do a proper implementation of the emergency alert system, which is why every Amber alert uses the "the bombs are falling" warning level.
I currently pay monthly but if I had to get a PAYG plan, I'd go with something like Saily: saily.com/esim-canada/
Or one of those other eSim companies. However, I'm not sure if it's just data or if it'll give you a number. Typically with PAYG I'm happy with just data, but I know it doesn't work for everyone. The cost is pretty wild though, I'm in London UK right now and I got a 200GB PAYG SIM for the same price as the 20GB SIM on Saily.
I've currently been messing around trying to make the Switch 2 Pro Controller work on Linux using the raw HID commands from this website, to potentially build into a driver as a bit of a project to get better at C. However, seemingly nothing I use can send any commands properly, or at least in a way that makes the controller work. I've tried both echo, sending bytes to the /dev/hidraw6 device (that device at least on my system, may vary on others), as well as hidapitester (a wrapper for hidapi). I know the device works, as a WebUSB tool that uses the same commands makes the controller work on this system. Is anyone more familiar with this, and can point me in the right direction? I'm on Fedora Linux 42 if that info helps.
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Hold on here how is Linux Desktop beating out chrome OS? Don't get me wrong I am totally onboard with Linux winning over chrome OS. But I just don't believe it.
I can got to any local store right now and buy a Chrome OS computer. I can't say the same for Linux.
I know technically ChromeOS is running Linux under the hood but it has been so bastardized by Google that it looses the spirit of Linux that it shouldn't be consider the same thing. At least in my opinion.
People who lost everything describe leaving homes and express anger at poor preparedness and officials who seemed to shirk responsibility
As Texas marshals a formidable response to the flash floods that have already killed dozens, questions are now being posed about warnings that were given on Thursday and early Friday about the severity of the approaching storm and the co-ordination between local officials and the National Weather Service.
New flood alerts were issued for Texas “hill country” on Sunday, prompting rescue services to suspend the search for missing people, including at least 11 from Camp Mystic, the summer camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River hard hit by Friday’s flash flood.
At an early evening press briefing, Kerr county authorities said they were suspending the search and evacuating first responders from the river valley. They confirmed that 68 had died there, including 28 children. Not all have been identified, with officials still examining the bodies of 18 adults and 10 children.
Hi all, I have tried everything, and now I am coming here for help. Hopefully someone can tell me what's happening here. So, I have this older pc that I have converted into a steam console, first with Bazzite and now with Chimera OS. Both work very nicely, but the one issue that persisted on both distros is that when I put the pc to sleep from game mode (press xbox button>power>sleep) then wake it up, the screen is not receiving a signal, it not even a black screen, just no signal. I would have to force reboot it to be able to get in. Nothing works. I can't even get into a tty screen or do anything. It is connected to a samsung tv 65mu8000 via HDMI cable. I have UHD color input enabled for that input, just to give more details.
I have tried disabling the wake up animation like some folks suggested and that didn't do anything. I have tried disabling the display core like some other searches suggested by putting amdgpu.dc=0 in modprob.d in its own file. I have tried blocking the intel iGPU, even though this CPU doesn't have one. Nothing works. It has an intel core i7 5930k and an AMD RX 6600. I would appreciate any help or suggestions Thank you
Hi all, I have tried everything, and now I am coming here for help. Hopefully someone can tell me what's happening here. So, I have this older pc that I have converted into a steam console, first with Bazzite and now with Chimera OS. Both work very nicely, but the one issue that persisted on both distros is that when I put the pc to sleep from game mode (press xbox button>power>sleep) then wake it up, the screen is not receiving a signal, it not even a black screen, just no signal. I would have to force reboot it to be able to get in. Nothing works. I can't even get into a tty screen or do anything. It is connected to a samsung tv 65mu8000 via HDMI cable. I have UHD color input enabled for that input, just to give more details.
I have tried disabling the wake up animation like some folks suggested and that didn't do anything. I have tried disabling the display core like some other searches suggested by putting amdgpu.dc=0 in modprob.d in its own file. I have tried blocking the intel iGPU, even though this CPU doesn't have one. Nothing works. It has an intel core i7 5930k and an AMD RX 6600. I would appreciate any help or suggestions Thank you
I've had the similar problems with bazzite in desktop mode coming back from sleep or screen off, first with Nvidia, then solved by switching to an AMD graphics card, but now it happens there too. I have two workarounds.
1) Try Ctrl+Alt+F1and Ctrl+Alt+F3. You should be able to switch to console then back to desktop/login screen.
2) In KDE Plasma, there's a way to map wake screen to a keyboard button. That worked for me until I reinstalled the OS and never bothered.
I think this is a Plasma or SSDM issue but idk how to report it properly.
It would allow SSH if the desktop is locked, they're separate. If you can get in via SSH then you can poke around logs like dmesg and see what's up. There will probably be some messages to give you something more specific to search with.
You think it's the screen/hdmi at fault, but it might not be. I've had the problem with two laptops in the past (the bug was with all distros I tried), and in one case it was a BIOS that Linux didn't like, and the second one was the internal wifi that its linux driver was buggy. For the first laptop there was nothing to be done, so I disabled sleep completely in the bios, while for the second one, I disabled the wifi modules in the kernel's blacklist, and then used a usb wifi that I knew it worked better. Both cases were appearing as a dead screen, but it wasn't the screen/hdmi/gfx card to blame. In yet another case, with a thinkpad laptop, the wake up was working, but it would wake up 30 seconds later than anticipated. In that case, it was the fact that its thunderbolt was dead (hardware had gone bad), and only when I disabled it in the bios completely the laptop would wake up correctly and fast.
In all those cases, I had to look at the kernel logs to see what was the issue. There were traces of the problem of which hardware exactly was creating the problem. It might look like a screen/hdmi problem, but most of the times, it's not.
David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, has tailored together his take on Hyprland combined with Arch. It looks quite neat and promising and looks like a nice entry point for those who don't want to configure hyprland themselves. DHH describes Omarchy as:
Turn a fresh Arch installation into a fully-configured, beautiful, and modern web development system based on Hyprland by running a single command. That's the one-line pitch for Omarchy (like it was for Omakub). No need to write bespoke configs for every essential tool just to get started or to be up on all the latest command-line tools. Omarchy is an opinionated take on what Linux can be at its best.
Omarchy comes in different themes, and by the looks of it this are hotswappable on the go by using the keybinds: Super + Ctrl + Shift + Space.
David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, has tailored together his take on Hyprland combined with Arch. It looks quite neat and promising and looks like a nice entry point for those who don't want to configure hyprland themselves. DHH describes Omarchy as:
Turn a fresh Arch installation into a fully-configured, beautiful, and modern web development system based on Hyprland by running a single command. That's the one-line pitch for Omarchy (like it was for Omakub). No need to write bespoke configs for every essential tool just to get started or to be up on all the latest command-line tools. Omarchy is an opinionated take on what Linux can be at its best.
Omarchy comes in different themes, and by the looks of it this are hotswappable on the go by using the keybinds: Super + Ctrl + Shift + Space.
my annoyance with his output aside, can we make it so that you can't use "beautiful" on your own shit? others can say your stuff is, you can't go "I created a beautiful xy".
I have so many things I want to do but just can't. Play a video game, read a book, take dog for walk, build a gadget I bought parts for, finish writing a song, finish building a computer... But no, I just sit there stuck. How do I get unstuck?
Imake a list and number them and then go on random.org and have it choose an integer and then i do the the thing on the list that matches the number randomly chosen.
This way i’m not making a decision, the lord of chaos is.
No it's really that the result feels like a decision imposed on me and my brain can't deal with that... It's the same if I start to do something I want, then someone calls to tell me to do it and now I can't do it anymore. Not sure if it's PDA or something else, but it's really annoying, especially in combination with AuDHD.
Challenges usually get the opposite reaction than demands for me, I can't even count all the stuff I've done because of it. Maybe self (not-)imposed challenges would work? I'll need to give it a try. Though challenges also have their problems, like picking the most stupid or pointless ideas because I was advised not to do it. I think there's a correlation between how stupid and pointless an idea is and how quickly my brain latches onto in 😅
Editor’s note: The Canada Files is the country's only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We've provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.
It should be of little surprise that Ford has since fiercely pursued his dream ‘Fortress-AmCan’, at a devastating cost to Ontarians.
There's almost no realistic threat China could pose to us right now that warrants us getting closer to the US and doing more to benefit Trump. My priority right now is to get as independent from the US as possible and fast
He might be gone in a few years, but the way they are setting things up the Republican regime may be here to stay. Better to seek independence for better security
It should be of little surprise that Ford has since fiercely pursued his dream ‘Fortress-AmCan’, at a devastating cost to Ontarians.
There's almost no realistic threat China could pose to us right now that warrants us getting closer to the US and doing more to benefit Trump. My priority right now is to get as independent from the US as possible and fast
“Ontario and Canada have critical minerals in abundance and America needs them. At a time when China is winning the race to dominate these resources while also restricting the sale and shipment of critical minerals to the U.S., Canada and Ontario need to urgently get our critical minerals out of the ground, processed and shipped to the factory floors that are building for the future.”
US, afaik, has tariffs on Canadian critical materials, while it makes deals with China to ensure the access it needs, and while it destroys commercial supply of new energy within US, to make sure it needs as little as possible. Banning "CCP" energy is a basis for lies for banning Chinese solar that don't have CCP ties, and even if they did, it's a fucking solar panel.
If bill C5 was used as a carrot to come into effect after the US makes an acceptable trade deal, which means elimination of all tariffs imposed this year, then this would be a somewhat acceptable act of sycophancy. Without "normalized US trade relations", it is extreme oppressive enslavement of Ontarians/Canadians.
An economic future for any nation with critical minerals is to develop them. Forcing colonial slavery of a single buyer who is currently committed against the future, while excluding buyers driving the future, is pure treason, and economic/social/climate terrorism on its own people/businesses.
Canada needs to cut all military ties with US. Stop seeking alliances where political capital is all in on war on Russia and China and Iran. US empire is collapsing, but it can buy a few years by exploiting its colonies harder. It is categorically unacceptable for our rulers to assist US destruction of our colony.
What happened to Ontario saving its auto sector? Japan/SK/US companies that cut investments/factories should have their phone/electronics brands tariffed. Huawei 5g, and datacenters/AI should be welcome. DST definitely threatened to be reimposed. High fees for access to NORAD. If Ford, is happy to destroy Auto manufacturing, then Australian prosperity has done well with better value cars and Chinese trade as a better economic model.
Fortress Can-Am has a pathethic political appeal, ONLY IF, there exists someone from the Am side that is enthusiastic about it.
If you look at old silent movies, they were played at different speeds in different cinemas and projections. There wasn't a standard way to play a movie, no "you NEED to play the movie at this specific speed or it will be ruined". I'm not saying the same should apply to modern movies, but I find it interesting.
There's an AUR open-tv package for Arch/Artix/..., and there's even an AUR open-tv-bin version, but I prefer looking at the build recipes if available, and if not using Arch/Artix/... one can read through the PKGBUILD and see how it builds.
Genuine Question. Even if I look at hungarian Transport, and they to this day use trains from the UdSSR, they come more consistantly then the DB.
They are really Bad sometimes, with like 20 seperate prices: Theres the bayernwald ticket that only works in the alps, then theres the official ticket to the destination. Theres a special offer, but only in the very special APP. You can use a d-ticket, but look! Some random ass slum in the middle of the worlds ass dosent accept that, but it does the MVV zone Tickets. But then you need the MVV zone 11-M, a ticket to the beginning to the Nürnberg zones, and a ticket for the Nürnberg zones.
And yet this shit is better than americas rails? How?
Am I in the minority, thinking that the London Underground is actually pretty amazing? Wherever I was across the huge area the city takes up, I rarely needed to check a timetable- There would be a station within walking distance, I could be relatively confident that a train would turn up within fifteen minutes and get me to basically anywhere in London in fairly short order.
Don't even need an Opal card- just tap your phone or your bank card.
The network is also massive. You can tap on in Kiama and tap off in Scone. That's about 400km, roughly equivalent to Berlin to Frankfurt, on regular metro trains. Might take a while, but you can do it.
It’s official: Premier Danielle Smith can now call herself Queen of Measles.
And not just in Alberta. Try North America.
That’s right. Alberta now leads the continent in a preventable childhood disease that leaves at least two of every 1,000 infections with severe intellectual disabilities, pneumonia or hearing loss. Or dead.
Stunningly, Alberta has already recorded nearly half a dozen cases of measles present at birth in the province.
And every measles infection leaves a child with a disabled immune system, stripped of memory about how to fight other routine infections. As a result, any unvaccinated child who battles measles will probably be sicklier, possibly for years afterwards. Brazilian researchers recently found a high correlation between having measles and later dying of another infectious disease.
Queen of the measles, Queen of treachery, Queen of stupidity, Queen of ignorance.....I could keep going, but let's keep it short with a resounding fuck Danielle Smith 😀
For a decade, Vancouver city managers knew an employee in the building inspection department was part owner of a private company that did work frequently checked by city inspectors.
That employee and the city staff he managed often inspected the company’s work, and a conflict-of-interest investigation found the employee, “in their capacity as a city inspector, personally made decisions about the private sector business they owned in four instances.” None of those decisions were “unfavourable” to the business, the report said.
The employee also said he’d been offered, but refused, a bribe from another contractor. An analysis by the city’s Office of the Auditor General, or OAG, found the contractor had appeared to receive preferential treatment from the employee.
On the day a month-long trial for a man accused of "significant" human trafficking was set to begin, the Crown's case fell apart over a technicality.
Christian Vitela, 37, and his defence lawyer had not received all disclosure or evidence related to the case in the years leading up to the criminal trial, assistant Crown attorney Heather Palin said on April 23.
Vitela hadn't accessed all phone records of the migrant workers he was charged with trafficking — the phones had been seized by the RCMP and were "typically core disclosure in human trafficking prosecutions," said Vitela's lawyer, Tobias Okada-Phillips.
The RCMP, which initially laid nine human trafficking charges against Vitela in 2019, have a different version of events. It includes that they notified Vitela on several occasions that the information was available, and set up a room and computer for him to view the materials, but he never showed up.
Everyone in Ontario should remember Christian Vitela's name and share Christian Vitela's name across social media, so that people are aware of Christian Vitela penchant for human trafficking and mistreating people who worked for him.
I’ve been making plantain chips for a bit, and I’m always dissatisfied with them. If my plantains are too ripe, the chips can’t crunch up. Not ripe enough and they lack the slight sweetness I love.
I decided to grab the greenest ones at the market to slowly ripen them at home, but even that’s a bit wonky, as they tend to ripen on top but not the bottom, which leaves me with something peculiar and delicious, but certainly not what I’m looking for.
So, how do you consistently get plantains in the Goldilocks zone?
Un homme a sauvé une famille de six personnes prise au piège dans un appartement en flammes dans le 18e arrondissement de Paris, ce vendredi 4 juillet.
Un homme a sauvé une famille de six personnes prise au piège dans un appartement en flammes dans le 18e arrondissement de Paris, ce vendredi 4 juillet.
Pro-AI mod and self-proclaimed 'communist' got mad for being downvoted.
Summary:
I downvoted pro-AI comments in a post in leftymemes community. It was LLM generated polandball comic (Which is objectively pathetic as fuck) that showed up on my feed, blocked couple of users who I thought were unhinged, and have blocked the whole instance on my client after realizing how rabid these morons are.
I didn't go looking for AI posts like a vigilante.
One user in question got miffed for being downvoted and banned me from places they moderate.
Sorry, I thought I replied already, but I was uhh a "bit" tipsy and a bit in the !trees@sh.itjust.works a few days ago so I have no idea what numbers I was reading, but I could have sworn they looked different then LMAO 😂
Looking at it sober with such a stark difference, I'm going to stay the course unless there's a significant drop in MAUs in the coming weeks
Ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc5 kernel expected to be released tomorrow, a round of x86 platform driver updates were merged this week with several fixes as well as some new device additions.
Three years since the Bash 5.2 release and one year since the first alpha release, GNU Bash 5.3 was released overnight as the newest step forward for this popular shell used on Linux and other operating systems.
Having all your configuration hidden in ~/.config/, so you can have ~ all to yourself is nice, IMO. Just having a handful of folders (including hidden ones) makes things a little more readable.
This vulnerability report has been generated using data aggregated on Vulnerability-Lookup, with contributions from the platform’s community.
It highlights the most frequently mentioned vulnerability for June 2025, based on sightings collected from various sources, including MISP, Exploit-DB, Bluesky, Mastodon, GitHub Gists, The Shadowserver Foundation, Nuclei, and more. For further details, please visit this page.
The June 2025 report highlights a mix of long-standing and newly identified high-risk vulnerabilities. Notably, Citrix discloses a critical NetScaler ADC/Gateway flaw (CVE-2025-5777), dubbed “CitrixBleed 2,” which can expose session tokens and bypass multi-factor authentication — echoing last year’s infamous CitrixBleed. Other urgent issues include a PayU India WordPress plugin vulnerability (CVE-2025-31022) that allows full account takeover across thousands of sites, and a Python “tarfile” library bug (CVE-2025-4517) that enables attackers to write files outside intended directories. Among the most sighted vulnerabilities are multiple Microsoft Windows 10 and Google Chrome flaws, as well as several Citrix ADC bugs, many rated “High” or “Critical.” Common web weaknesses like cross-site scripting and SQL injection (CWE-79, CWE-89) remain widespread, highlighting the ongoing need for strong patching hygiene. Some older vulnerabilities — such as the 2015 D-Link DIR-645 flaw and known Confluence or Cisco RCE bugs — also continue to see active exploitation. Organizations should prioritize remediation of these critical and actively targeted vulnerabilities, while reinforcing application security against injection and XSS attacks.
CitrixBleed 2 Citrix patched a critical vulnerability in its NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway products that is already being compared to the infamous CitrixBleed flaw exploited by ransomware gangs and other cyber scum, although there haven't been any reports of active exploitation. Yet.
Security analyst Kevin Beaumont dubbed the vulnerability "CitrixBleed 2." As The Register's readers likely remember, that earlier flaw (CVE-2023-4966) allowed attackers to access a device's memory, find session tokens, and then use those to impersonate an authenticated user while bypassing multi-factor authentication — which is also possible with this new bug.
GCVE-1-2025-0002: Cl0p Ransomware Data Exfiltration Vulnerable to RCE Attacks A newly identified security vulnerability in the Cl0p ransomware group’s data exfiltration utility has exposed a critical remote code execution (RCE) flaw that security researchers and rival threat actors could potentially exploit.
The vulnerability, designated as GCVE-1-2025-0002, was published on July 1, 2025, and carries a high severity rating of 8.9 on the CVSS:4.0 scale.
CVE-2025-31022: More details about PayU wordpress extension "This can be abused by a malicious actor to perform action which normally should only be able to be executed by higher privileged users. These actions might allow the malicious actor to gain admin access to the website."
CVE-2025-4517: Additional information RISK : Multiple vulnerabilities affect the standard TarFile library for CPython. Currently, there is no indication that the vulnerability is actively exploited, but because it is a zero-day with a substantial install base, attackers can exploit it at any moment. An attacker could exploit flaws to bypass safety checks when extracting compressed files, allowing them to write files outside intended directories, create malicious links, or tamper with system files even when protections are supposedly enabled. Successful exploitation could lead to unauthorised access, data corruption, or malware installation, especially if your systems or third-party tools handle untrusted file uploads or archives RECOMMENDED ACTION: Patch Source: ccb.be
If you have suggestions, please feel free to open a ticket on our GitHub repository. Your feedback is invaluable to us! github.com/vulnerability-looku…
Nuclei is a fast, customizable vulnerability scanner powered by the global security community and built on a simple YAML-based DSL, enabling collaboration to tackle trending vulnerabilities on the ...
Well, that's like...great and all. Is this game a big deal though? I played it a few hours and it never really hit with me. The movement was cool, but the actual gameplay was like Parkour Payday.
My friends and I play it nightly, because it's a good casual FPS and it has many modes, decent progression. Honestly environment destruction is such a powerful mechanic for making games have variability between games that it makes each feel unique - like a puzzle even at times.
There's not a great deal of free games right now that are capturing our attention, we wanted an FPS this month, and there's been no paid games everyone's been willing to jump on.
Funny enough we're waiting on Arc Raiders to drop which is also a game by the studio behind The Finals.
"I know zero people who play it, so let me into the inside knowledge about it. "
"Hi, my friends and I play it. We're people. Here's why we like it."
"You sound like an ad".
My brother in Christ, you asked for someone to tell you about the game and then I did - wtf did you think was going to happen. I'm not even really giving it a glowing review. I'm mostly saying there's not a lot of great competition in the scene right now and this game does enough good to be fun to play. At the cost of free, my poorer friends are happy to play it while we wait for the next paid game we know we want to get.
I'd love to be playing Nightreign but it's not good enough for them to buy in, and other games like... Oh what's that extraction shooter by the original Hell Let Loose team... Hunger? That's not out yet.
Like ya dawg, I like The Finals - I'm a guy on the Internet responding to a comment from a random about the Finals. That's a pretty safe bet.
Attackers with physical access to a Linux system can access a debug shell simply by entering the wrong decryption password several times in a row.
Yeah, no duh. This isn't a critical security flaw unless you have the worst partition scheme on your encrypted volumes imaginable. It's not even a process flaw at that point, just "possible".
This is essentially what the Israeli government did to Android a decade ago with Pegasus: if you can get in front of the bootloader, you can compromise disks once encrypted because everything is happening in an in-memory boot process.
Thats how it has always been and always will be. If a threat actor had free access to your device for even just a couple seconds, its compromised rare earth trash.
Exactly. Silicon is not a rare earth element. Neither is Aluminium nor plastic nor Lithium (it's getting rarer alright, but doesn't fall into the category).
The amount of rare earth elements is really small in these devices.
Explain. The way i understand it, if somebody flashes malware into your firmware or bootloader then that device cant really be guaranteed to ever be safe again.
Secure boot helps protect against evil maid attacks by checking hardware and OS signatures. If the boot process has been tampered with, the user can be alerted that the secure boot process can no longer properly verify signatures.
While its probably true that you can no longer guarantee that system can be used safely ever again, at least you will be aware that it was tampered with and you can go ahead and send that system to e-waste and get you a new system.
i know this is not for PCs but GrapheneOS uses the Google Titan chip and this app to solve that problem.
might be a long time before we get similar hardware for PCs. the only thing that's remotely similar is the Apple T2 for MacBooks but there's no Linux distro with comparable security to GrapheneOS yet.
It seems the issue here is that initramfs is not signed, which makes this attack possible.
If it is signed and an evil maid modifies the initramfs itself, it will break the secure boot process and the user will be notified that their system has been tampered with. This should indicate that the secure boot protection is working.
If initramfs is not signed and it drops to the debug shell, then the attacker can make any changes to your system without it affecting secure boot, since it has already passed the protection. At least that's my understanding when I read this.
This is true, unfortunately some Linux users have been conditioned to "just turn off Secure Boot" without understanding what this actually means and entails.
Despite considering that I need to setup secure boot for my laptop, I have kept it on hold for a bit too long. But then again, considering the area I am in, I can hardly expect someone to try and steal my data or try to put a ransomware or similar thing, if it means having to get physical access for it. Much higher chance for someone to just steal and sell the thing as is.
There are probably cases where turning off Secure Boot is fine. If you make that decision for yourself and are aware of the implications, go ahead. My remark wasn't against users turning it off, but rather against the advice of "just turn it off lol"
Yeah, that's probably just people who read the initial comments from back when secure boot keys were not user configurable (and support wasn't available in Linux) and kept on echoing it all the way to the present.
Kinda similar to the "Linux is just secure" echoers, who might have started from some proper argument explaining what kinds of security problems don't exist in systems developed using Linux and why they don't require installing a 24/7 antivirus background process. Because people tend to make catchphrases. I too sometimes, forget the implications and tend to make them.
Depends on the OS, but you can generally have mkinitcpio handle generating new UKIs after updates and also have it trigger something like sbctl to re-sign images.
This is an issue with these half-baked security solutions.
Don't get me wrong: the setup protects against some very common threats (i.e. device gets stolen). But they're unsuited for evil maid attacks.
Secure Boot isn't flawless, but it can improve system security if used correctly; unfortunately, most distributions don't go all the way as demonstrated here. I guess this can be solved via UKIs, but anything built on the users machine like an initramfs can't be signed properly if no user TPM keys are enrolled and available during generation.
The issue I have with all this is that these distributions don't really tell you that the security they provide is ultimately limited. Personally, I have custom TPM keys, the initramfs is signed, I unlock via TPM PIN and the emergency mode is disabled. Also UEFI needs to be password protected so that an attached can't modify your booting parameters, though this couldn't be done undetected because it'd break TPM supported boot.
A proof-of-concept exploit for a critical local privilege escalation vulnerability affecting major Linux distributions, including Fedora and SUSE environments.
I started using computers at 640x480, sometimes 800x600. 1024x768 was a blessing. Since then I've always cherished every extra pixel I could get. I would never dare use anything above 1x scale.
I've used a laptop that needed scaling despite only having a 1080p screen (because the screen was too small? Not sure) and now I'm certain I'm never purchasing a monitor that needs scaling.
To me, pushing 1080p but only having the screen real state of 1366x768 felt pretty dumb, on top of dealing with scaling woes being a pan in the ass in every OS
Drumpy has been promoting their brand new "rapidly assembled" ICE "detention facility" (read: concentration camp) that they (themselves) nicknamed "Alligator Alcatraz" in the middle of the Florida Everglades (middle-of-no-where swamp land)
TwiddleTwaddle
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •The shortest answer -
Arch has really good documentation and a release style that works for a lot of people.
Ubuntu is coorporitized and less reliable Debian with features that many people dont need or want.
POTOOOOOOOO
in reply to TwiddleTwaddle • • •hexagonwin
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •non_burglar
in reply to hexagonwin • • •anon5621
in reply to non_burglar • • •caseyweederman
in reply to non_burglar • • •non_burglar
in reply to caseyweederman • • •I think so. I lost count of the little things, it really was death by a thousand paper cuts.
I was a pretty rabid fan of Ubuntu, still have an x86 and ppc CD of 5.04 somewhere.
But by the time snaps started appearing, and then Ubuntu pro, Ubuntu decided to revert some of my customized configs in /etc after an upgrade, I had had enough. When snaps were reinstalled after an upgrade in 2021, I just flipped over to Debian, which has come a long way in being usable out of the box.
fartsparkles
in reply to caseyweederman • • •sudo
in reply to non_burglar • • •wut
non_burglar
in reply to sudo • • •It's true, and it was a huge pain in the ass:
answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+…
Question #223855 “Why is ffmpeg obsolete?” : Questions : Ubuntu
Launchpadsudo
in reply to non_burglar • • •non_burglar
in reply to sudo • • •At the time, canonical was throwing its weight around and essentially bullying Debian upstream repos. Around this time, there was a mass exodus of the Debian leadership over this kind of thing.
The old guard of Debian wasn't as... enthusiastic about systemd either, but look what they use now.
webghost0101
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •fmstrat
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •The biggest one: Snaps.
I switched from Ubuntu to Debian, and it's basically the same thing, just faster since it uses native packages instead of Snaps. Ubuntu might as well run all it's apps in Docker containers.
You could rebrand Debian to Ubuntu and most users wouldn't even notice.
Sina
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •UsoSaito
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Chewy
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Arch requires reading the manual to install it, so installing it successfully is an accomplishment.
It's rolling release with a large repo which fits perfectly for regularly used systems which require up-to-date drivers. In that sense it's quite unique as e.g. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has less packages.
It has basically any desktop available without any preference or customisations by default.
They have a great short name and solid logo.
Arch is community-based and is quite pragmatic when it comes to packaging. E.g. they don't remove proprietary codecs like e.g. Fedora.
Ubuntu is made by a company and Canonical wants to shape their OS and user experience as they think is best. This makes them develop things like snap to work for them (as it's their project) instead of using e.g. flatpak (which is only an alternative for a subset of snaps features). This corporate mindset clashes with the terminally online Linux desktop community.
Also, they seem to focus more on their enterprise server experience, as that is where their income stream comes from.
But like always, people with strong opinions are those voicing them loudly. Most Linux users don't care and use what works best for them. For that crowd Ubuntu is a good default without any major downsides.
Edit: A major advantage of Ubuntu are their extended security updates not found on any other distro (others simply do not patch them). Those are locked behind a subscription for companies and a free account for a few devices for personal use.
POTOOOOOOOO
in reply to Chewy • • •Aatube
in reply to Chewy • • •Not really with archiinstall, but indeed as you say reading the manual is an expectation. Their philosophy is "creating an environment that is straightforward and relatively easy for the user to understand directly, rather than providing polished point-and-click style management tools", as well-summarized by Wikipedia.
tbh that goes for every distro. It's just that Canonical is more hands-on with its approach. The major complaint with Snap besides performance issues is Canonical making it so that only the Snap versions of popular apps (most famously, the bundled Firefox) are available by default.
VoidJuiceConcentrate
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •I don't know about everyone else, but the last couple of years has had the most unstable Ubuntu releases, with the most unrecoverable releases when issues happen.
I've since moved to Fedora for desktop and straight Debian for server.
POTOOOOOOOO
in reply to VoidJuiceConcentrate • • •VoidJuiceConcentrate
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •I used it a little way back in 2005-2006ish, and decided to give it a try again after a third reinstall of ubuntu within a year last year.
though, I'm about to get a "new" laptop and may toy around with Arch on the old one. I had previously tried setting up Arch in a VM but that's not supported and ended poorly.
aim_at_me
in reply to VoidJuiceConcentrate • • •AnUnusualRelic
in reply to VoidJuiceConcentrate • • •VoidJuiceConcentrate
in reply to AnUnusualRelic • • •Feyd
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •- it is rolling release and I like having up to date software and not having to deal with distro upgrades breaking things
- it is community run and not beholden to a company
- packages are mostly unmodified from their upstream
- the wiki and forums are the best of any distro
webghost0101
in reply to Feyd • • •folaht
in reply to Feyd • • •the wiki ~~and forums~~ are the best of any distro
If you don't participate in it that is.
If you veer only a little off of their strict rules,
then Arch forum will ban you and they won't allow you to even read the forum.
audaxdreik
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •I don't really have a concise answer, but allow me to ramble from personal experience for a bit:
I'm a sysadmin that was VERY heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. It was all I worked with professionally and really all I had ever used personally as well. I grew up with Windows 3.1 and just kept on from there, although I did mess with Linux from time to time.
Microsoft continues to enshittify Windows in many well-documented ways. From small things like not letting you customize the Start menu and task bar, to things like microstuttering from all the data it's trying to load over the web, to the ads it keeps trying to shove into various corners. A million little splinters that add up over time. Still, I considered myself a power user, someone able to make registry tweaks and PowerShell scripts to suit my needs.
Arch isn't particularly difficult for anyone who is comfortable with OSes and has excellent documentation. After installation it is extremely minimal, coming with a relatively bare set of applications to keep it functioning. Using the documentation to make small decisions for yourself like which photo viewer or paint app to install feels empowering. Having all those splinters from Windows disappear at once and be replaced with a system that feels both personal and trustworthy does, in a weird way, kind of border on an almost religious experience. You can laugh, but these are the tools that a lot of us live our daily lives on, for both work and play. Removing a bloated corporation from that chain of trust does feel liberating.
As to why particularly Arch? I think it's just that level of control. I admit it's not for everyone, but again, if you're at least somewhat technically inclined, I absolutely believe it can be a great first distro, especially for learning. Ubuntu has made some bad decisions recently, but even before that, I always found myself tinkering with every install until it became some sort of Franken-Debian monster. And I like pacman way better than apt, fight me, nerds.
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krakenfury
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Is it really? I've always understood the cult around it as a joke.
But seriously, RTFM.
DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Arch has a very in-depth wiki that's the go-to resource for a lot of Linux users, and it offers a community-driven way to have access to literally anything that's ever landed on Linux ever through the AUR. It's also nice to have an OS that you never have to reinstall (assuming all things go well).
Why that turned into such a cult-meme is anyone's guess though.
paequ2
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •sudo
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •About 10 years ago it was The Distro for first time linux users to prove they were a True Linux Enjoyer. Think a bunch of channers bragging about how they are the true linux master race because they edited a grub config.
Before Arch that role belonged to Gentoo. Since then that role has transitioned to NixOS who aren't nearly as toxic but still culty. "Way of the future" etc.
All three of have high bars of entry so everyone has to take pride in the effort they put in to learn how to install their distro. Like getting hazed into a frat except you actually learn something.
The Ubuntu hatred is completely unrelated. That has to do with them being a corporate distro that keep making bad design decisions. And their ubiquity means everyone has to deal with their bad decisions. (snap bad)
NotSteve_
in reply to sudo • • •exu
in reply to NotSteve_ • • •FrederikNJS
in reply to exu • • •sudo
in reply to FrederikNJS • • •archinstallwith LVM on LUKS is sufficient.typhoon
in reply to sudo • • •exu
in reply to FrederikNJS • • •BTRFS with LUKS (OpenSUSE gets close), but using rEFInd as bootloader. Snapper snapshots, Zram.
I'm actually thinking about switching to systemd-boot with Secure Boot, TPM2 and stuff, so even further from mainstream installers.
FrederikNJS
in reply to exu • • •Last time I used EndeavourOS, I managed to get the graphical installer to install BTRFS on LUKS, it did require custom partitioning in the graphical installer, snapper just worked after that.
Zram (or was it Zswap?) was pretty easy to enable after installatiok
The bootloader might be beyond what the graphical installer can do though... I never really bothered switching...
MimicJar
in reply to sudo • • •To add, before the change the Gentoo wiki was a top resource when it came to Linux questions. Even if you didn't use Gentoo you could find detailed information on how various parts of Linux worked.
One day the Gentoo wiki died. It got temporary mirrors quickly, but it took a long time to get up and working again. This left a huge opening for another wiki, the Arch wiki, to become the new top resource.
I suspect, for a number of reasons, Arch was always going to replace Gentoo as the "True Linux Explorer", but the wiki outage accelerated it.
ColeSloth
in reply to sudo • • •OhVenus_Baby
in reply to ColeSloth • • •OhVenus_Baby
in reply to sudo • • •sudo
in reply to OhVenus_Baby • • •Shinji_Ikari [he/him]
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •I just think its good.
The way I see it, you can have an OS that breaks less often and is hard to fix, or an OS that breaks a little more often that is easy to fix. I choose the latter. 99/100 times, when something breaks with an update, it's on the front page of archlinux.org with a fix.
The problems I've faced with other distros or windows is the solution is often "reinstall, lol", which is like a 3 hour session of nails on a chalkboard for me.
Outdoor_Catgirl [she/her, they/them]
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •folaht
in reply to Outdoor_Catgirl [she/her, they/them] • • •segfault11 [any]
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Ms. ArmoredThirteen
in reply to segfault11 [any] • • •Chump [he/him]
in reply to Ms. ArmoredThirteen • • •the_q
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •m532
in reply to the_q • • •But arch is less work, not more
Ubuntu = breaking update every 2 years
Arch = breaking update never
oscardejarjayes [comrade/them]
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •lordnikon
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •like this
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muusemuuse
in reply to lordnikon • • •downhomechunk
in reply to lordnikon • • •underscores
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •I use Ubuntu professionally and Arch at home
Anything that's not Windows is my preference.
I love arch because I know what's in it and how to fix it and what to expect, the community is mostly very nice and open to help
AUR is great and using pacman feels lovely
I also care about learning and understanding the system I'm using beyond just using a GUI that does everything for me
Ubuntu is not bad it's probably one of the most used distros by far
Linux motto is: Use what you like and customize it how you like because there is no company forcing you to do things their way
muusemuuse
in reply to underscores • • •IBM would like to do have a few words.
ikidd
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •like this
Mordikan likes this.
四眼心理医生
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •TankieTanuki [he/him]
in reply to 四眼心理医生 • • •Fizz
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •deafboy
in reply to Fizz • • •kylian0087
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •disco
in reply to kylian0087 • • •"oh no I took the memes literal"
This ain't 2010 anymore. Community is great.
idefix
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •It's funny because I see the same cult behavior, but for Fedora. I've never understood the point of this distribution that has never worked well for me.
I'm on Manjaro by the way, because I love everything about Arch except the release style.
WFH
in reply to idefix • • •Funnily enough, I feel the opposite. Manjaro never worked reliably for me, but Fedora works great for my use case. Is it perfect? Fuck if I know. But it's a good, no-nonsense, extremely low maintenance, super reliable distro that I use daily with zero issues.
Also, they pioneered the atomic distro concept that has amazing use cases, and some fantastic projects are based on this technology. My gaming PC runs Bazzite for a zero-maintenance, immediate gaming experience. My dads laptop runs Bluefin and he hasn't broken it yet, and he's capable of breaking every single OS.
timbuck2themoon
in reply to WFH • • •Same.
That said, never heard of fedora being a cult at all. Hell I feel it gets far less recognition than it should honestly for being cutting edge and stable.
exu
in reply to idefix • • •idefix
in reply to exu • • •exu
in reply to idefix • • •But you're still getting updates every day, just two weeks later than Arch. The "testing" is just two other branches somewhat closer to the Arch package releases.
wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Swi…
Switching Branches
Manjaroidefix
in reply to exu • • •Stable Updates
Manjaro Linux ForumAnUnusualRelic
in reply to exu • • •OhVenus_Baby
in reply to idefix • • •POTOOOOOOOO
in reply to idefix • • •Mactan
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •bmrd
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •like this
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TankieTanuki [he/him]
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •like this
HeerlijkeDrop likes this.
m532
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •NewOldGuard [he/him, they/them]
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Arch is amazing for what it is, hence the love. It’s what you make of it; by default there’s nothing and you design your own system from scratch. This leads to a very passionate and enthusiastic community who do great work for one another, for everybody’s benefit. Anything under the sun can be found in the AUR, the distro repos are fresh and reliable, and every issue that arises has a hundred people documenting the fix before it’s patched.
Ubuntu has a bad reputation for inconsistency, privacy invasive choices, etc. I don’t think all the hate is deserved, as they corrected course after the Amazon search fiasco, but I still won’t use it because of Snaps. They have a proprietary backend, so even if I wanted to put up with their other strange design decisions I can’t unless I wanted closed source repos. That goes against my whole philosophy and reasoning for being on Linux to begin with, and many feel the same.
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Yozul
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Normal people who use Arch don't bring it up much, because they're all sick of the memes and are really, REALLY tired of immediately being called rude elitist neckbeard cultists every time they mention it.
The Ubuntu hate is because Canonical has a long history of making weird, controversial decisions that split the Linux community for no good reason.
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Zacryon
in reply to Yozul • • •MyNameIsRichard
in reply to Zacryon • • •folaht
in reply to MyNameIsRichard • • •Unity would be the first example, and although Unity was actually a good DE,
it was too bloated and almost non-modifiable.
People jumped ship to Linux Mint that had its priorities straight.
Mir and Snap were bigger issues though
as Wayland and Flatpak were great replacements for
X11 and AppImage and did not need another competitor.
But the privacy issues were the straw that broke the camel's back.
People left windows for linux so they wouldn't have to deal with this
kind of nonsense.
I actually jumped when Ubuntu jumped to Gnome 3.
Gnome 3 was too bloated for me and it looked ugly.
I decided to see what Arch Linux was about
and eventually settled for Manjaro Linux.
Arch + Xfce for the win.
BunScientist
in reply to folaht • • •undrwater
in reply to MyNameIsRichard • • •I tried Ubuntu on a laptop, and when i saw the Amazon logo, I did a double take. I actually got a bit dizzy, and had to evaluate what I had just done.
Shame on me though, because I installed Ubuntu on a vps, and got spam in my ssh session. "Get Ubuntu pro now!"
Sigh.
hankthetankie [none/use name]
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •I'm quite experienced in Linux but I wouldn't use either. Arch is great if you like to tinker, Ubuntu sucks for the not so libre approach , corporate ties, telemetry etc. I distrohopped before but today I just install my debian based distro and shit works.. Ubuntu I've installed twice before when I was new to Linux, and have had a major issues every time due to official updates that broke internet drivers and other things, that's a fun one when you only have one PC . Not to mention its so bloated that shitty computers that I like to thinker with it have a hard time catching up. The arch thing is also mostly a kind of meme, targeting the more unbearable nerds. People I hated when I was a noob (they will let you know you are) But they are found everywhere and in general I don't think there's more of those people in arch community than anywhere else. It's more of a stab at elitism than arch specifically.
I see a point in arch but zero in ubuntu.
juipeltje
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Luffy
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Arch Hits the great spot
It has:
- a great wiki
- many packages, enough for anything you want to do
- its the only distros that is beetween everything done for you and gentoo-like fuck you.
- and the Memes.
MonkderVierte
in reply to Luffy • • •glitching
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •because they used to be special. "I run linux", matrix text on boot, typing shit in the terminal, "I'm in", awe-inspiring shit to an onlooker...
but nowadays, anyone can run ubuntu or mint or whatevs and our hero ain't special no more. so here comes the ultimate delimiter.
folaht
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Arch is better because...
Being able to search easily for files within a package is a godsend when some app refuses to work giving you an error message
"lib_obscure.so.1 cannot be found".
I haven't had such issues in a long time, but when I do, I don't have to worry about doing a ten hour search, if I'm lucky, for where this obscure library file is supposed to be located and in what package it should be part of.
The "cult" is mostly gushing over AUR.
chellomere
in reply to folaht • • •disco
in reply to chellomere • • •Captain Aggravated
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •"I run Arch btw" became a meme because until install scripts became commonplace you had to have a reasonable understanding of the terminal and ability to read and follow instructions to install Arch Linux to a usable state. "Look at my l33t skills."
Dislike of Ubuntu comes from Canonical...well...petting the cat backwards. They go against the grain a lot. They're increasingly corporate, they did a sketchy sponsorship thing with Amazon at one point, around ten years ago they were in the midst of this whole "Not Invented Here" thing; all tech had to be invented in-house, instead of systemd they made and abandoned Upstart, instead of working on Wayland they pissed away time on Mir, instead of Gnome or KDE they made Unity, and instead of APT they decided to build Snap. Which is the one they're still clinging to.
For desktop users there are a lot better distros than Ubuntu these days.
brax
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •I left Ubuntu for Arch because I got sick of Arch having everything I wanted and Ubuntu taking ages to finally get it. I was tired of compiling shit all the time just to keep up to date.
Honestly glad I made the change, too. Arch has been so much better all around. Less bloat and far fewer problems.
notarobot
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •I installed arch before there was the official install script. It's not that is was THAT difficult, but it does provide a great sense of accomplishment, you learn a lot, customize everything, and you literally only install things you know you want. (Fun story: I had to start over twice: the first time I forgot to install sudo, the second I forgot to install the package needed to have an internet connection)
All of this combined mean that the users have a sense of pride for being an arch user so they talk about it more that the rest. There is no pride in clicking your way though an installer that makes all the choices for you
disco
in reply to notarobot • • •notarobot
in reply to disco • • •blob42
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Raccoonn
in reply to blob42 • • •disco
in reply to Raccoonn • • •Yozul
in reply to blob42 • • •The problem there is that stable vs unstable distro uses a slightly different meaning of the word stable than you would use to talk about a stable vs unstable system.
In distro speak, a stable distro is one that changes very little over time, and an unstable one is one that changes constantly. That's sort of tangentially related to reliability, in that if your system is reliable and doesn't change then it's likely to stay that way, but it's not the same thing as reliability.
Mordikan
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •I think Arch is so popular because its considered a middle of the road distro. Even if not exactly true, Ubuntu is seen as more of a pre-packaged distro. Arch would be more al a carte with what you are actually running. I started with Slackware back in the day when everything was a lot more complicated to get setup, and there was even then this notation that ease of access and customization were separate and you can't have both. Either the OS controls everything and its easy or you control everything and its hard. To some extent that's always going to be true, but there's no reason you can't or shouldn't try to strike a balance between the two. I think Arch fits nicely into that space.
I also wouldn't use the term "cultists" as much as "aholes". If you've ever been on the Arch forums you know what I'm talking about. There is a certain kind of dickish behavior that occurs there, but it somewhat is understandable. A lot of problems are vaguely posted (several times over) with no backing logs or info to determine anything. Just "Something just happened. Tell me how to fix it?". And on top of that, those asking for help refuse to read the wiki or participate in the problem solving. They just want an online PC repair shop basically.
小莱卡
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Dessalines
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •I'm not sure either. I think arch used to be one of the less popular distros (because of the more involved install process, solved now by the arch-based distros with friendly installers), despite having some of the best features, so it required more "evangelism", that's unecessary now. Arch-based distros are now some of the most popular ones, so its not necessary.
Others have commented on why its so great, but the AUR + Rolling releases + stability means that arch is one of the "stable end states". You might hop around a lot, but its one of the ones you end up landing on, and have no reason to change from.
DigitalDilemma
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •dino
in reply to DigitalDilemma • • •Kitty Jynx
in reply to DigitalDilemma • • •thenextguy
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •obsoleteacct
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •There are a lot of different reasons that people hate Ubuntu. Most of them Not great reasons.
Ubuntu became popular by making desktop Linux approachable to normal people. Some of the abnormal people already using Linux hated this.
In November 2010, Ubuntu switched from GNOME as their default desktop to Unity. This made many users furious.
Then in 2017, Ubuntu switched from Unity to Gnome. This made many users furious.
There's also a graveyard of products and services that infuriated users when canonical started them, then infuriated users when they discontinued them.
And the Amazon "scandal".
And then there's the telemetry stuff.
Meanwhile. Arch has always been the bad boy that dares you to love him... unapproachable and edgy.
Helix 🧬
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •OhVenus_Baby
in reply to Helix 🧬 • • •typhoon
in reply to Helix 🧬 • • •ruffsl
in reply to typhoon • • •If there was a simple Debian based distro that I could declaratively manage via a single config file, I think I'd try it. I.e. not using Puppet or Chef that can only bootstrap a system state, but something to truly manage a system's entire life cycle, including removing packages and anything littering the system file tree. But since there isn't, I'm using NixOS instead.
Having a DSL to declare my entire system install, that I can revision control like any other software project, has been convenient for self documenting my setup and changes/fixes over time. Modularizing that config has been great for managing multiple host machines synchronously, so both my laptop and desktop feel the same without extra admin work.
Nixpkgs also bolsters a lot of bleeding edge releases for the majority of FOSS packages I use, which I'm still getting used to. And because of how the packaging works, it's also trivial to config the packages to build from customer sources or with custom features. E.g. enabling load monitoring for Nvidia GPUs from
btopthat many distros don't ship by default.Marn
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •I've started with ubuntu/mint and it was always a matter of time before something broke then i tried everything from then all the major distros and found that I loved being on a rolling release with openSUSE Tubleweed (gaming and most new software works better) and BTRFS on Fedora (BTRFS let's you have boot time snapshots you can go back to if anything breaks).
After some research I found I can get both with arch so installed arch as a learning process via the outstanding wiki and have never looked back.
Nowadays I just install endevourOS because it's just an arch distro with easy BTRFS setup and easy gui installer was almost exactly like my custom arch cofigs and it uses official arch repos so you update just like arch (unlike manjaro). It's been more stable than windows 10 for me.
Tldr: arch let's you pick exactly what you want in a distro and is updated with the latest software something important if you game with nvidia GPU for example.
loomy
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •ohshit604
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •dino
in reply to ohshit604 • • •ohshit604
in reply to dino • • •मुक्त
in reply to ohshit604 • • •shirro
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •I had moved from Slackware to Debian but by 2004 the long release cycles of Debian were making it very hard to use any Debian with current hardware or desktop environments. I was using Sid and dealing with the breakages. Ubuntu promised a reskinned Debian with 6 month release cycles synced to Gnome. Then they over delivered with a live cd and easy installation and it was a deserved phenomenon. I very enthusiastically installed Warty Warthog. Even bought some merch.
When Ubuntu launched it was promoted as a community distro, "humanity towards others" etc despite being privately funded. Naked people holding hands. Lots of very good community outreach etc.
The problem for Ubuntu was it wasn't really a community distro at all. It was Canonical building on the hard work of Debian volunteers. Unlike Redhat, Canonical had a bad case of not invented here projects that never got adopted elsewhere like upstart, unity, mir, snaps and leaving their users with half-arsed experiments that then got dropped. Also Mint exists so you can have the Ubuntu usability enhancements of Debian run by a community like Debian. I guess there is a perception now that Ubuntu is a mid corpo-linux stuck between two great community deb-based systems so from the perspective of others in the Linux community a lot of us don't get why people would use it.
Arch would be just another community distro but for a lot of people they got the formula right. Great documentation, reasonably painless rolling release, and very little deviation from upstream. Debian maintainers have a very nasty habit of adding lots of patches even to gold standard security projects from openbsd . They broke ssh key generation. Then they linked ssh with systemd libs making vulnerable to a state actor via the xz backdoor. Arch maintainers don't do this bullshit.
Everything else is stereotypes. Always feeling like you have to justify using arch, which is a very nice stable, pure linux experience, just because it doesn't have a super friendly installer. Or having to justify Ubuntu which just works for a lot of people despite it not really being all that popular with the rest of the linux community.
outhouseperilous
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •rustyredox
in reply to outhouseperilous • • •pineapple
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Nibodhika
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Ok, I think I can provide some insight into this that I think it's missed on other replies.
I switched to Arch back when Arch had an installer, yup, that's right, Arch used to have an installer, then they removed it and you had to do most of the process manually (yes, I know
pacstrapis technically an installer, but I'm talking about the original ncurses installer here).After Arch removed its installer it began to attract more purists, and with that the meme was born, people online would be discussing stuff and someone would explain something simple and the other would reply with "I use arch BTW", which meant you didn't need to explain trivial stuff because the person had a good idea on how their system works.
Then Arch started to suffer from being too good of a distro, see those of us that were using it consistently saw posts with people complaining about issues on their distros that never affected us, so a sort of "it doesn't happen on my distro" effect started to grow, putting that together with the excellent wiki that people were linking left and right (even for non Arch users) and lots of people became interested.
This new wave of users was relatively new to Linux, they thought that by following a tutorial and running a couple of command lines when installing arch they had become complete experts in Linux, and they saw the "I use Arch btw" replies and thought they meant "I know more than you because I use Arch", so they started to repeat that. And it became common to see posts with people being L337 H4ck3r5 with no clue whatsoever using "I use Arch btw".
That's when the sort of cult mentality formed, you had experienced people who liked Arch because it was a good distro that didn't break on its own with good documentation to help when you screw up, these people suffered a bit from this and told newbies that they should use Arch. Together with that you had the other group who thought because they installed Arch they were hackers telling people Arch was waaaay too hard, and that only true Linux experts should use it. From the outside this must have felt that we were hiding something, you had several people telling you to come to our side or they couldn't help you, or pointing at documentation that looked specific for their distro, and others saying you weren't cool enough for it probably felt like a cult recruiting.
At the end of the day Arch is a very cool distro, I've tried lots of them but prefer Arch because it's a breeze to maintain in the long run. And the installation process is not something you want to throw at a person who just wants to install Linux to check it out, but it's also not complicated at all. There are experts using Ubuntu or other "noob" distros because at the end of the day it's all the same under the hood, using Arch will not make you better at Linux, it will just force you to learn basic concepts to finish the installation that if you had been using Linux for a while you probably already know them (e.g. fstab or locale).
As for Ubuntu, part of it stems from the same "I use Arch btw" guys dumping on Ubuntu for being "noob", other part is because Canonical has a history of not adoption community stuff and instead try to develop their own thing, also they sent your search queries to Amazon at some point which obviously went very badly for their image in the community.
Average Familiarity
xkcdpasdechance
in reply to Nibodhika • • •suzucappo
in reply to Nibodhika • • •I used Ubuntu as my first distro out of curiosity sometime around 2006. I've tried others (Mint, Pop OS, Debian, Fedora) but mostly settled with Ubuntu because it was just kind of ok for me and as another user said, there was a lot of articles that helped with getting things working because it became popular.
I had heard of Arch and to your point the it's complicated thing very much kept me away from it even though I have been using computers for around 30 years and was comfortable using a terminal.
The other thing is gaming, I consistently had problems with the nvidia cards that I've had over the years and never really cared to dig into trying to get things to work so Linux was kind of my testing ground for other things and just general learning about how things work.
Then I finally just had enough of Windows a couple of years ago, and with gaming support getting better I went back to Ubuntu and it just didn't feel good, I wanted something different that was setup how I wanted it so I looked into Arch.
I tried a couple of times to manually install it but my attention span (ADHD) kept me from focusing on the documentation enough to actually learn what I was doing. In comes the archinstall script, it was basic enough for me to follow and understand to get my system up and running.
I went through roughly 3-4 installs using it and testing stuff after I had it running and breaking stuff and just doing a fresh install since the script made it very easy. Since then I have learned a good bit more, and honestly don't think I will ever use another distro for my desktop. Just the ability to make it exactly what you want and things just work. Not to mention the documentation is massive and the AUR is awesome.
I do use Pop OS on my wife's laptop since it decided to automatically upgrade to W11 which crippled it and I just wanted something that I could just drop on there that would work with no real configuration since the only thing it needs is Citrix which works ootb and she can use all her office tools through that and has libre office if she wants to do something locally.
I do have a separate drive with W11 on my desktop, its used for one thing, SolidWorks. Which I use enough to merit having windows.
Arch was and still kind of is seen as the "I use Arch BTW" crowd, but it really shouldn't be that way. The install script isn't fancy, but it works. I think that would be one of the biggest barriers to break that mindset and open it to more people that are still fresh to Linux. I think that having even the most basic "GUI" for installing Arch would do wonders.
Bronstein_Tardigrade
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •ColdWater
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •pleaaaaaze
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •pasdechance
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •catty
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Magiilaro
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •My way of thinking and working is incompatible with most premade automatism, it utterly confuses me when a system is doing something on its own without me configuring it that way.
That's why I have issues with many of the "easy" distributions like Ubuntu. Those want to be to helpful for my taste.
Don't take me wrong, I am not against automatism or helper tools/functions, not at all.
I just want to have full knowledge and full control of them.
I used Gentoo for years and it was heaven for me, the possibility to turn every knob exactly like I wanted them to be was so great, but in the end was the time spend compiling everything not worth it.
That's why I changed to Arch Linux. The bare bone nature of the base install and the high flexibility of pacman and the AUR are ideal for me. I love that Arch is not easy, that it doesn't try to anticipate what I want to do. If something happens automatically it is because I configured the system do behave that way.
NewNewAugustEast
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Ubuntu? Its a can't make up its mind what it is trying to be while always becoming a crashy mess. When it first came out I remember trying it and immediately broke it.
The last time I installed it recently it had issues out of the box.
flynnguy
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •So I love Debian but it prides itself on stability so packages tend to be older. I think this is good for a server but probably not great for a desktop. Ubuntu came along and was like we'll be like Debian but newer packages. Everything was cool for a while but then they started doing shitty things. The first that I can think of was ads in the terminal. This was not great for an open source app. Then when you did
apt install firefoxit installed Firefox as a snap. WTF?!?!? (apt should install .deb files, not snaps). Because of this, lately I've decided to avoid Ubuntu.I used Gentoo for a while and it was great but configuring and compiling everything took forever. I'm getting too old for that. Arch seems like a good alternative for people who want to mess with their system. So it's become a way for people to claim they know what they are doing without having to recompile everything. (Note: I haven't used Arch, this is just my perception)
Recently I got a new laptop and I had decided to put Linux on it and had to decide what distro. Arch was in consideration but I ended up going with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it's got the latest but I don't really have to configure anything. If I had more time, I might go with something like Arch but I don't really want to do that much fiddling right now.
krolden
in reply to flynnguy • • •RattlerSix
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •I wonder if it's just me or if other people who were around before Ubuntu feel the same way but the reason I hate Ubuntu is that it seemed to take over the Linux world.
A lot of the information about how to do something in Linux was drowned out by how to do it in Ubuntu. When searching for information you have to scroll down in the search results for something that sounds unrelated to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu material was often titled "how to do it in Linux" and you thought you had a good long tutorial until you read a few paragraphs in and realized it was for Ubuntu and wouldn't work for you for whatever reason.
Even some software that says it's available on Windows and Linux just means they have a Ubuntu package and if you're really good there's a chance you might be able to figure out how to use it on a non Ubuntu system.
It's like when Ubuntu came out, people just assumed that Linux was Ubuntu. I've never used Ubuntu so a lot of the information I've came across regarding it has just been in the way of me finding useful information.
krolden
in reply to RattlerSix • • •thedeadwalking4242
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •like this
BubblyRomeo likes this.
scoobford
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Arch has a cult like following because it emphasizes simplicity and customizability. If you have the time to fully administer your own system, there is no better choice.
Ubuntu is corporate, frequently out of date, and sometimes incompetent. They got big a long time ago when they were a significantly easier option than their competitors, but I really don't think there's compelling reason for a new user to install Ubuntu today.
chaoticnumber
in reply to scoobford • • •dink
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •Maybe it's masochism, but I like Arch because it forces me to make mistakes and learn. No default DE, several network management choices, lots of configuration for non-defaults. These are all decisions I have to make, and if I try to cut corners I usually get punished for it.
However, I think the real reason I stick with arch is because this paradigm means that I always feel capable of fixing issues. As people solve the issues they face, forum posts and wiki articles (and sometimes big fixes) get pushed out, and knowledge is shared. That sense of community and building on something I feel like Arch promotes.
Sanctus
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •qyron
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •The Arch users being so vocal is more of a trope to me. Never fails to make me smile.
Ubuntu started as a great endeavour. They made Linux much more approachable to the less tech inclined user.
It is an achievement to get a distro capable of basically work out of the box that hides the hard/technical stuff under the hood and delivers a working machine, and they did it and popularized Linux in the process.
Unfortunately, they abused the good faith they garnered. The Amazon partnership, their desktop that nobody really enjoyed, the Snap push. These are the ones I was made aware of but I risk there were more issues.
I was a user of Ubuntu for less than six months. Strange as it may sound, after trying SUSE and Debian, when I actively searched for a more friendly distro, I rolled back to Debian exactly because Ubuntu felt awkward.
Ubuntu is still a strong contributor but unless they grow a spine and actually create a product people will want to pay for, with no unpopular or weird options on the direction the OS "must" take, they won't get much support from the wide user community.
HiddenLayer555
in reply to POTOOOOOOOO • • •like this
BubblyRomeo likes this.
Nate Cox
in reply to HiddenLayer555 • • •Rust introduces novel features and makes notable changes from its ancestors.
Arch was just blue Gentoo.
TheFadingOne
in reply to Nate Cox • • •I don't know if that ever was true but I definitely disagree with that nowadays because Arch is in my opinion significantly more approachable and easier to daily-drive than Gentoo.